


bloody but unbowed

by firetestsgold



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Civil War, Eventual Smut, F/F, Fix-It, Leadership, No Character Death, Politics, canon re-write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-05-28 02:13:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6311083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firetestsgold/pseuds/firetestsgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s no peace. No sense. There is no twelve clan coalition, no alliance with the sky people. Nothing but war. And in the middle of it are three survivors, three leaders meeting on a bridge and trying to secure the future for their people. </p><p>A canon rewrite, the story that Clarke and Lexa should have had, starting from 1x09 “Unity Day.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks and a dedication to Seeley (harvardhands on ao3/Julie-johnston on tumblr) for ranting with me for the last month and getting me to a point where I can still write about this stupid show. Shoutout to Jroth for being so stupid I was motivated by spite to write a better story for Clexa than he could, the story they deserved. In my mind. 
> 
> Quick notes: it’ll be clarified later, but for the sake of avoiding confusion right off the bat, there is no twelve clan coalition. Lexa commands Trikru only. Anya is her foremost general. Initially this will recount scenes from the show as I establish the story, but it will quickly branch out from there into its own story.
> 
> Also, the title comes from possibly my favorite poem ever: Invictus, by William Earnest Henly. 
> 
> Finally, go donate to The Trevor Project if you haven’t already: https://www.classy.org/fundraise?fcid=625415

Every part of her body screams at her to turn on her heel and run, because if there’s anything she has learned thus far on the ground, it’s that escape will always be the easiest option. Flight. The way her muscles twitch with the animal instinct to _move_ , she feels a traitor to her own physical existence for resisting and standing still on the bridge, open and exposed, an easy target. Even Finn's sweaty hand in hers is of little comfort. Clarke simply wants to use it to pull him back into the safe cover of the trees and sprint to safety.

Only one word keeps her rooted to the spot: _peace._ Finn believes in it, Lincoln believes in it, and Octavia...well, Octavia believes in Lincoln. To Clarke, it seems less an achievable goal and more a fragile, precious trinket, unobtainable and inpractical when it comes to survival on the ground.

Luckily, her friends hiding in the trees with loaded rifles agree.

A strange rhythmic clattering on the far side of the bridge snaps her back to full attention, but what emerges from the trees isn't anything like what she was expecting.

"Oh my god," she breathes, "Horses."

She's only ever seen horses in the history books, obviously, but even glossy hundred year-old pictures of stallions at full gallop don't do justice to the imposing, magnificent animals who appear at the end of the bridge. For half a second, she wants to smile. Then the tightening of Finn's hand in hers reminds her of the four people sitting astride the horses, and Clarke returns to reality. Her whole body floods with adrenaline.

Two guards wearing heavy armor and masks made from what look to be human skulls pull up short, their threatening presence not at all mitigated by the distance. The two other riders proceed forward slowly: two women, faces smeared with black war paint instead of skull masks, their wild hair braided back, swaths of blood red fabric woven into their black armor.

The leaders, as Lincoln promised.

Finn charges forward, outraged. "Hey, we said no weapons!" he shouts. The Grounders have wicked looking blades and axes hanging from their waists, bows in their hands.

"I was told there wouldn't be," Lincoln growls.

Clarke, on the other hand, hasn't concerned herself with the weapons—she's more focused on the scowls carved into the stone faces of the grounder leaders, the kind of hate in their eyes that could enable them to rip someone apart barehanded. Weapons are extraneous here.

"It's too late now," she says blankly. With a nod to Finn, they step forward together, by Lincoln stops him with a hand across his chest.

"She goes alone."

Octavia, Lincoln, and Finn look at once to Clarke for her acceptance and orders. "I'll be fine," she says after a moment, more for her sake than Finn's.

"Clarke..." Finn says.

"It's time to do better." His words, her actions.

Clinging to that sense of purpose, Clarke walks alone to the center of the bridge, taking slow steps to give herself time to bury every shadow of fear beneath a thousand pounds of resolve so that they can't tell, the way animals are supposed to be able to sense fear. Even still, she says a quiet prayer that the bullets in the guns in the trees are good ones.

The two women slide down from their horses and stride toward her, straight-backed and radiating power with each step. When the three meet in the center of the bridge, she can feel their eyes appraising her, judging her, measuring her to determine how much of a threat she is. Clarke tries not to give any weakness away; after a moment, the taller woman, with blonde-streaked hair, relaxes and slouches back with a look that hints at disappointment. The other, with dark hair and green eyes and black paint that wears like a mask, remains upright and stoic, resting one hand on her sword hilt at her hip.

"Your name is Clarke?" the first one asks.

Clarke nods. "Yes."

"I'm Anya." In the silence that falls over them, both Anya and Clarke look to the third girl, still staring at Clarke. "Heda?" Anya leads.

"Lexa," the girl says simply. She raises her chin and clasps her hands behind her back, offering nothing more and waiting for the leader of the Sky People to make her play.

Instead, Clarke offers out her hand.

Neither Lexa or Anya take it: Lexa doesn't even look down from Clarke's face, and Anya glances down for a second only to return to Clarke's eyes with a dubious expression. Slowly, Clarke's fingers curl back into her hand and she lets it fall to her side. She swears she hears a huff of impatience—or amusement?—from Lexa. She doesn't know which is worse.

These aren't people she can sway, Clarke realizes, nor threaten or appeal to. Arker politics won't work. The only thing she can do is give is the truth and hope that's enough.

"I think we got off to a rough start," she begins. A humble understatement. "But we want to find a way to live together. In peace."

Anya's eyebrows twitch upwards—again, it's a question of impatience or amusement.

"I understand...you started a war you don't know how to end."

"What? No—" Fear floods her. "We didn't start anything. You attacked us for no reason—"

"No reason? You-" Anya snarls, stepping forward with teeth bared, but Lexa raises a hand and it's as if it physically jerks Anya back, the way she suddenly halts— _so she's the one in charge here._ Fittingly, Lexa takes over, with glowing eyes no less dangerous than Anya's.

"The missiles you launched burned a village to the ground," Lexa hisses. "Families. Not warriors. Innocent people. _My people._ "

 _Missiles?_ They didn't even have the tools to hunt docile mutant deer for the first several days, let alone build destructive weaponry. Except..."The flares?" she realizes. "No, those were a signal, for our families."

"Invaders," Lexa growls. "Your ship came down in my lands."

"And only the commander’s formality keeps you from being killed where you stand for what you've done since," Anya adds.

Lexa's voice comes quiet: "Anya..."

Clarke is shaking her head, scrambling to fix this as she feels the weight of their glares increase. "We didn't know anyone was here, we didn't—"

"You knew we were here when you sent an armed raiding party to capture one of us and torture him!" Anya fires back, this time ignoring Lexa's raised hand and stepping forward, bearing down on Clarke. "You knew we were here when you collected guns meant to kill us. These are all acts of _war._ "

"Anya!" Lexa shouts, with a harshness and power far beyond her apperance, forcing Clarke to clench her jaw tight to avoid reacting in fear; Anya, anger radiating off her, seems to strain against the command before she stands down.

Anya wants to kill her. Lexa probably does as well, with only proper conventions holding her back. But at the same time, Bellamy is waiting in the trees with guns trained on them, and they've been building explosives and fixing weapons back at camp. The burning desire to slaughter Grounders is what's keeping the camp together. She heaves a sigh and admits it: "You're right."

Lexa had been glaring at Anya, and Anya at Lexa—they both turn in suprise to Clarke at her confession.

"I see your point now," she continues. "That's why we need to put a stop to this before it goes any further."

And then they are appraising her again, the way they did before, questioning the honesty and honor of someone who flips from enemy to ally so quickly. It's not a question Clarke has an answer for herself, because honor, like peace, seems an extravagant luxury down here. But through all her time on the bridge with them, she's finally come to Finn's conclusion: the alternative to the abstract goal of peace with these people is the very real concept of death and suffering at their hands. And she refuses to let that happen to the kids back at camp, the people still up in the Ark.

Lexa is the first to come to a conclusion and speak, her anger concealed once more behind blank, unreadable eyes. "You mentioned your families. Lincoln said there are more coming down."

"Warriors," Anya says.

Clarke nods earnestly. "The guard, yes. But also farmers, doctors, engineers."

"Then who are you?" Lexa asks. "Why were you sent down first, if not warriors or farmers or doctors?"

"We were..." words sticking in her throat, "A sacrifice. A necessary one. For the rest of them to survive."

That gets a reaction: Lexa raises her chin and scrutinize Clarke more closely than before, her body relaxing in the strangest of ways.

"Listen to me," Clarke presses. "My people can help yours. We can work together and rebuild. But not if we're at war."

"Can you promise that the new arrivals won't attack us? That they'll respect the terms you and I agree on?"

Anya stiffins and Clarke hears her low warning murmur of " _Heda..._ " below the wind, but Lexa doesn't heed it, waiting for Clarke's answer. "I promise to do everything I can to convince them," she says.

"And that's your offer?" Lexa laughs humorlessly. "You're new to the art of negotiation, Clarke of the Sky People—but explain to me why I should accept an alliance that your people can break the moment they get here? Explain why Anya should not lead an army to erase the memory of you and leave your people with nothing but _ashes_ of their sacrifice?"

As if called forth by her voice, a harsh wind whips through the valley that the river below them has carved out of the earth—the cold blasts through Clarke's outer layers, but she can't even feel it against her hot skin, not with the way her heard hammers blood and adrenaline to every inch of her body. The feeling of fear, the desire to run rises burning in her throat.

And then, all at once, the desire to fight takes over. This time, Clarke is the one who steps forward, eyes narrowed.

"My people were so desperate to survive that they jettisoned us, sacrificed hundreds of their children to buy themselves more time. Do you think finding our ashes will scare them? Do you think they'll hesitate when they see you? If you fire the first shot, they won't bother negotiating. There would be death on all sides. But our technology...they'll wipe you out."

Lexa's eyes flash. Anya's lips curl into a satisfied smile, like she has the fight she has wanted since she dismounted from her horse.

"They wouldn't be the first to try," she says. She draws the words out like a purr.

"But people will die. Is it worth that, when we could have had peace?"

She no longer wants to run. Maybe she's strengthened during the course of the conversation or maybe she's come to believe that her own steel facade is real, but in either case, she has clung to the idea and dug her heels in to the maximum of her obstinacy. And while Anya looks to relish the idea of a fight, her smile a threat, Lexa considers Clarke with a dark, questioning gaze, and Clarke knows, inherently, that they won't kill her. In a heartbeat they may start a war or they may agree to peace terms, but they will not draw blood here.

In the next instant, the world shatters.

"Grounders!"

Clarke doesn’t understand the hoarse shouting at first because every one of her senses is so finely attuned to Lexa and Anya that the world has ceased to exist to her outside of the ten-foot section of concrete bridge they stand on. The sound is more like wind roaring in her ears. But Lexa and Anya’s attention snaps to riverbank behind Clarke and they drop into defensive stances and grab for their weapons and without warning, the air if filled the clatter of gunfire. That’s when the screams resolve themselves into a recognizable voice. Jasper.

“Fuck! Grounders in the trees!” he bellows, bursting out of hiding. “Grounders in the trees! _Clarke, run!_ ”

White-hot fear floods her and shocks into her legs, but they’re like lead: a spear flies through the air and bangs off the bridge just feet to her left and she’s scrambling back, trying to find safety, cover, anything, as Bellamy and Raven burst forth with their guns blazing as well. The horses are screaming and rearing on the far end of the bridge. Beneath the deafening sound of the blood in her ears and the chaos all around, she hears the wicked, furious hiss of a language she doesn’t know and she spins to see Anya, knife drawn, lunging at her—but another crack of gunfire, and Anya spins away.

Lexa’s sharp cry pierces the chaos and she dives forward, grabbing for Anya and tackling her down. Their combined momentum boulders into Clarke and the three go down in a heap as arrows and spears and bullets crisscross overhead.

“Clarke, run!” It’s Finn, sprinting toward her from their end of the bridge. She shouts something at him—something unintelligible, panicked—as he skids to a stop in the wet leaves and seizes her arms to pull her to her feet. Behind her, Lexa grabs desperately for Clarke’s legs, her teeth bared, but her fingers only scrabble at her boot before Clarke is wrenched away by Finn and she’s on her feet, legs churning, ears filled with the shouts of her friends to run and the war cries of grounders.

They escape into the forest, and they don’t stop, and they don’t dare look back until they hit the walls of their camp.

 

* * * * * 

 

She waits until the healer comes to her to her tent to announce that he’s finished. Anya has never liked being treated as it stands, and Lexa’s presence and the fury that emanates from her would only provide fuel for the fire burning Anya alive—they would do nothing but rage over the ambush and plan for revenge. It’s not a conducive environment for a healer to achieve much of anything. So she waits. And she paces. And she plans.

Vytar takes his sweet time about it, as well, clever as he is. By the time he gives her leave to come storming into the healer’s tent, Anya seems to have regained some of her usual composure. She sits on a table, stripped to her undershirt, examining the bandage on her shoulder.

“What did Vytar say about it?” Lexa asks, announcing her presence. Anya looks up at her and shrugs.

“I’ve survived, clearly, so nothing more needs to be said.”

“They didn’t coat it with anything?”

Anya shakes her head, and allows a small smile at the undercurrent of concern in Lexa’s voice as she walks forward, scrutinizing the bandage. They’re alone in the tent, with no one to question the commander or her general for the moment of softness and worry. Very rarely do their people come into contact with guns; never do they survive that contact. The ones who don’t immediately fall are always dragged away screaming by the mountain men. Though the healers suggested that Lexa would live, as she planned her next move and let herself bask in the fury of being attacked, a fear for Anya persisted.

As if reading her mind, Anya reaches behind her and picks it up between a thumb and forefinger for Lexa to inspect: the bullet. It’s just mashed metal now after being extracted from her shoulder, with blood in the crevices. It's appearance takes Lexa’s mind off of Anya’s injury. Anya drops it into Lexa’s palm, grinning as Lexa examines it for several seconds.

“Quite a prize,” Lexa says at last, handing it back. “You should keep it, for luck.”

Anya accepts with a nod, but once she sets the bullet aside again, her expression darkens—they shouldn’t be wasting any more time on her or a discussion of trinkets.

“How long before we move against them?”

Lexa takes a deep breath, drawing herself up. She has asked herself the question a million times in her tent between her worry for Anya, and she’s come to only one answer: “Immediately.”

“No more talks of peace.”

“Clarke of the Sky People wanted peace; her people chose war. My people choose war as well, and that’s what we shall have.”


	2. Chapter 2

It’s been all quiet, on every front, for four days.

Four days since the meeting on the bridge. Four days since her mother’s ship crashed to earth in a fiery explosion.

_She wasn’t on it,_ Clarke tells herself, constantly, every time she pauses in her work and the thought of the scorched and twisted metal of crash site threatens to buckle her. _You don’t know that she was on it._

The Ark has been silent since before the crash, but truthfully, Clarke is the only one who spends any time considering  what may or may not be still in the sky.

Murphy returns two days after the crash, and he brings with him a plague of death that rips through the camp and leaves nothing but bloody, weakened bodies in its wake. Clarke remembers stumbling out of the dropship and seeing the cloud of smoke from Raven’s bomb when she blows the bridge, stopping the attack—she remembers the kids cheering, waving their rifles in the air, roaring shouts of _“Not a fuckin’ chance!”_ and _“Blow ‘em apart!”_ into the sky for all to hear. Victorious. And short-sighted. But if small victories are all they’re going to get in this war, that’s what they’ll take, and Raven returns, unconscious and bloody, to a hero’s welcome.

The few who remain healthy take this as inspiration and stay vigilant on the walls, hardly sleeping to be ready for any attack, their fingers scratching at the triggers. And one by one, the sick delinquents recover their strength and join them on the walls. Four days after the meeting on the bridge, the coughing ceases. They return to double guards at each post. Watching. Waiting. Crazed with mingled fear and invincibility, as if they can actually survive this. Win. The sickness comes and goes, and they never see a single grounder.

“Maybe we scared them off,” Clarke offers to Bellamy one morning when they stray past the walls. She doesn’t bother to sound convincing.

“You really believe that?”

"No. They're coming."

They all know it. Clarke knows the inactivity is not the same as silence. On the contrary, since her encounter on her bridge, everything is louder. The snap of a branch in the forest sounds like a gunshot. Whispers between guards at night sound like shouting. Clarke’s thoughts will not quiet either: _We're going to war we're going to war we're going to war_ thrums in her head and aches in the pit of her stomach constantly when she’s awake. It haunts her nightmares when she sleeps.

But because anything that can go wrong, will go wrong—this is one of the truths they have learned on the ground—she can’t even focus entirely on the danger that is to come. Their food supply had burned to the ground that morning, meaning they had to leave only a sparse group of defenders at the camp while the rest go out hunting.

Myles, their gunner, stands watch while Clarke and Finn kneel over a trail of animal tracks. Clarke tries to attune herself to the sounds around them because she has the spear and Finn is defenseless, but all of it is drowned out by Myles’s nervous chatter.

“Is it one of those scaly panther things?” he asks, peering over their shoulders at the tracks in the mud. He flicks the safety of the gun on and off and on and off, relentlessly.

Finn traces the patterns with his fingertips. “Boar.” The tracks are so clear, even Clarke can tell.

“Good. That panther meat is nasty. But I could eat a whole boar by myself, no joke.” He laughs anxiously, as if hoping that Clarke and Finn will laugh as well and reassure him. They’re not listening, however; Finn slowly moves down along the trail, studying the tracks, and Clarke follows with her eyes on the trees.

The forest feels more alive than before, more menacing, pulsing with the anger of the ones who were here first. _War is coming war is coming war is coming._ The Sky People are invaders, and if their eighteen deaths so far weren't proof of that, the forest itself is reminding them of their unnatural presence with every snapping branch and rustle and animal cry in the night.

Clarke can't help but think of the commander, who, with her emerald eyes in a field of black warpaint, looks like a vengeful goddess of the forest herself. She remembers her shout, her snarl; they echo in the trees endlessly as a reminder.

In front of her, Finn suddenly tenses, as if he’s picking up the same menace in the air. Myles’s insistent yammering behind them covers the sounds of the forest.

“Myles, quiet for a second,” Clarke commands. “What is it, Finn?”

Finn traces the edge of a hoofprint with his fingertips, narrowing his eyes and muttering something about it. Unnerved, Clarke kneels for a closer look. “They’re perfect.”

“Too perfect…we’re the ones being hunted.”

At that realization, the incessant clicking of the safety behind them stops. Silence.

Myles, his voice low and his breath coming in short bursts, raises his gun and looks through the scope. “I don’t see anything—”

His words die in a yelp and a strangled shout as two arrows suddenly sprout from his body and he crumples to the ground. _Grounders._ The attack comes from nowhere and with no warning, arrows are hissing over their heads and Clarke can hear the crashing, pounding noise of grounders on the hunt. They barrel through the foliage toward them, from every direction, with no escape.

They don’t know where they’re coming from and they don’t know where to run, but instinct just tells them to _move—_ she grabs for Myles but Finn is already scrambling away, desperate for cover, pulling Clarke behind him.

“Clarke, come on, we gotta leave him!”

They get as far as the nearest tree before it’s over. There’s a grounder in front of her, then a flash of blinding light and a crack that sounds within her skull, and then nothing.

The last thing she remembers is the forest itself coming alive above her, black warpaint and green eyes swimming in her fading vision.

 

There’s a rope wound around her wrists when she regains consciousness and opens her eyes to the forest canopy far above. The grounders—six that she can count, grouped together across the clearing—stand with weapons drawn, waiting. Everything is silent. This is it. After everything they’ve done to survive, this is where it ends.

She rolls over and closes her eyes against the ground, and gives up.

“Finn?” she asks aloud after a moment, wondering if he’s gone already and she’ll be the featured execution, as leader of the sky people.

A heavy breath of relief from somewhere behind her is her answer. “Are you okay?” Finn asks quietly.

“I’m okay.”

The grounders pick up the low sound of their voices. Clarke opens her eyes again to see the warriors turning towards her, the group splitting so that the two leaders from the bridge, Lexa and Anya, can step forward. Clarke emotionlessly watches them cross the clearing towards her. Anya stops several feet back but Lexa kneels to get close to Clarke, examining her face. Clarke doesn’t fight and she doesn’t give anything away, keeping her emotions blank.

“Can you walk?” The Commander asks quietly.

“No.” Clarke’s lips curl around the word.

Lexa simply nods to two nearby warriors and without warning their hands are looping under her arms and Clarke is wrenched to her feet, her world wobbling from the sensation of being lifted like a ragdoll. They hold her there for a minute, effortlessly supporting her weight between them, before slowly lowering her and letting Clarke’s legs hold her own weight. She could flop limply to the ground, but she doesn’t see the point if there’s no way out of this—she will not delay the inevitably merely to irritate her captors.

When she stands on her own and scowls at the Commander with whatever she has left, Lexa simply raises her chin in approval of her cooperation. The grounders haul Finn to his feet as well, growling in a warning when he jerks from their grasp, but he stays put.

“Hurry,” Anya intones. “The sun will be down soon.”

They don’t talk on the march through the forest. At least, Clarke and Finn don’t. The grounders converse in low voices in their harsh, guttural language, occasionally issuing a sharp whistle or a shout and having it echoed back by invisible watchers in the trees all around them. But any time Finn tries to walk close enough to Clarke to whisper to her, he receives a rough shove with the butt-end of a spear, forced back several paces.

Clarke, for her part, can’t bring herself to care. The pounding concussion and the ache over her ear make her vision glaze over as she walks—there’s no escape route to memorize and nothing to look at but trees and trees and trees anyway—and her empty mind drifts to her mother, one of the charred bodies they found at the crashed exodus ship. She knows in her heart that her mother was on that ship. She thinks of her father, too, wherever his body may be now.

Soon.

It’s a reassuring thought. Seeing them again.

She doesn’t know how long the march takes but her body is tired by the time the structure comes into view. She frowns at it: four walls and a roof, crumbling and reclaimed by nature but still distinctly man-made and out of place in this new world. The grounders don’t give them time to admire the architecture but shove them inside, down a flight of stone steps.

At last Finn is allowed next to her, as they’re forced to their knees in the center of a dark room, and his profile in her peripheral vision and even the pressure of his arm against hers is a wave of sudden reassurance, a shock that wakes her up out of a haze. His breathing comes shallow and frantic, like they sprinted the march—she can’t think of anything to reassure him the way his presence has calmed her.

Inexplicably, the grounders file out of the room through an open door on the opposite side. A harsh conversation, bordering on an argument, drifts to their ears from inside the room, but the moment they’re alone, Finn turns to her with a more important focus: “Okay, we walked for about three miles after crossing that creek, another two or so before we got to the road—”

Clarke shakes her head and his words die midsentence. “I don’t think it matters, Finn…they didn’t blindfold us which means they don’t care what we saw.” His face shatters with the realization. “They’re probably gonna kill us.”

A high, clear command sounds from the room ahead and their guard reappears to grab their ropes and yank them to their feet again.

The room ahead isn’t any brighter than the first, a few candles guttering on the table and the only real light coming from high curtained windows. Lexa and Anya are imposing shadows in the center of the room, Commander and General—they’re the only regal things about this place, a damp, deep hole in the ground, stacked with boxes against the walls. There’s a table behind them, with a body on it. There will be no ceremonial executions here.

Clarke and Finn fall to their knees again and the two women turn toward them. Lexa steps back. The rasping sound of Anya drawing her sword sends another jolt of despair into Clarke’s stomach and she bows her head as the heavy footsteps come toward her.

_Mom. Dad._

Soon.

Finn tries one final time, fighting the men who hold him. Clarke can’t look at him. She wants it over. She doesn’t want to fight, she doesn’t want him to fight.

Anya grabs her wrists and Clarke sucks in one last breath and sees the flash of metal…and then she’s free. It takes her a moment to realize that Anya slipped the blade through the ropes around her wrists, slicing through them and setting her free before standing back. Clarke looks up in disbelief and bewilderment and pulls in another shallow, gasping breath.

“What do you want from us?”

One of the guards pushes aside the curtains on the window and the light throws the room into sharp relief, the same way Clarke’s body jumped back to life when she felt Anya’s sword cut through the bonds on her wrist. Her heart is hammering now. As Anya wordlessly steps aside to give Clarke a view of the lighted room, the blonde realizes that the lifeless form on the table wasn’t lifeless at all, but a racking, shaking young girl, gasping for breath the same way Clarke had just seconds before.

“Help her,” Anya says, and for the first time, Clarke hears something other than cool anger or threats in her voice: desperation. “She’s _dying_. And if she dies…” She points her sword at Finn. “He dies.”

The sounds of the dying girl fill the room to the ceiling, choked sobs and shuddered gasps of pain, but the sight is made worse by the lack of blood and the lack of warpaint and the lack of armor—Clarke pushes forward and bites the inside of her cheek at the rush of emotions that churn up in her at the sight of this young girl, fighting death with everything she has.

She can’t be any older than Charlotte.

“Her name is Tris,” Anya says, straining to keep her voice even. Behind her, in the shadows, Lexa murmurs quietly in their native language and Anya simply shakes her head. She grits her teeth hard and stares Clarke down.

“I can’t do this,” Clarke says, fighting the urge to run again, “I don’t have any equipment.”

“We’ll provide you with some.”

“Why do you think I can save her?” she demands.

Finn speaks up. “Because you saved me…Lincoln told her.”

The men that Anya gestured forward when Clarke asked for equipment come forward now, with boxes of medical supplies from god knows how long ago. Anya fixes her gaze on Clarke. “This is everything we have. Our healer is dead, there’s nothing we can do for her.”

Her voice threatens to break again and, once more, Lexa’s voice rises from the shadows, firmer than before. Whatever she says gets Anya’s attention this time: the general straightens to attention and nods, before striding toward the doorway. Before she disappears, she stops at Finn’s side, looks down at him, and then to Clarke.

“For his sake, I hope you save her.”

She leaves Clarke standing there, with Finn on his knees and a young girl dying on a table and the commander of the grounders watching her with an imperious, unblinking gaze. Clarke feels helpless again, like she’s still bound and pressed into the forest floor, but this time her limbs feel icy with fear—Finn’s life is in her hands. So is this girl’s, and she can’t even tell what’s wrong with her. As the grounder guards move to untie Finn, Clarke turns powerlessly to Lexa.

“What happened to her?”

“She was on the bridge when your bomb exploded,” Lexa replies with a low voice. “You did this to her, Clarke.”

 

* * * * *

 

A year ago—a lifetime ago, now—just before her father had been arrested, Clarke had attended one of her mother’s surgeries as an apprentice. She stood by Abby’s side and dutifully assisted her and Jackson as they worked to save a young woman, not much older than Clarke herself, who had been half-crushed while repairing a malfunctioning airlock. Those kinds of injuries and accidents were rare on the Ark, so the surgery itself was an event she attended with wide eyes and restless hands. Despite her first-time nerves and despite the way their limited anesthesia left the girl awake and groaning, Clarke memorized her mother’s movements with razor-sharp attention.

And when the girl began to convulse and Abby shouted Clarke out of the operating room, she stood just outside the glass door and watched the girl die on the table. With the same razor-sharp attention.

She doesn’t want to think about it, because she’d much rather focus on saving _this_ girl and saving Finn and escaping the heavy simmering gaze of the commander, who stands like a statue in her peripheral vision. But the racking sobs from the girl on the table—Tris—that Clarke is pulled back to that day on the Ark and the crushing realization that her mother was capable of failure. And so is she.

To still her shaking hands, Clarke grabs a random assortment of rusted medical tools from the pile on the ground, and then looks to Finn. She has to do this for him, for his wide, scared eyes and quickened breath.

“She’s getting worse,” he mutters, like the grounders will threaten him for it if they overhear.

“Help me lift her up.”

Finn obeys and Clarke, murmuring mindless words of comfort to the girl, leans close to listen to her breathing. She makes the diagnosis quickly. “She’s not moving any air on the left side…there’s fluid pressing on her lungs—”

“I don’t see an entry wound.”

“No, it—it wasn’t shrapnel, it was trauma.” Finn’s face falls with every word as they race to the same conclusion. “The force of the explosion must have hit her in the chest. _Fuck,_ she’s drowning in her own blood.”

Diagnosis made, only more worrying, Clarke pushes away from the table and dives back down to the pile of tools. Finding a scalpel among them is like finding buried treasure. She starts talking aloud, directing it to Finn, but mostly just voicing her own stream of consciousness: “I have to relieve the pressure…drain the cavity, allow the lung to expand, get air into it somehow…”

Commander Lexa, who had hovered on the edge of her vision and on the edge of her awareness so far, bursts fully into both when Clarke spins and lets her instincts take over, not caring who she is speaking to. “I need a small tube,” she barks at the commander and her guard. “Something rigid, the size of my finger _. Now_.”

She doesn’t realize the rough tone of her command until she sees the blank look of astonishment on the commander’s face. Her lips part and she blinks in surprise at being addressed in this way, but it’s the way her fingers seem to instinctively drop to the hilt of the dagger on her belt that gives Clarke a gut-wrenching understanding of her position—she’s the enemy. An enemy healer. A battered, scrappy enemy healer who has killed grounders en masse and is now snapping orders at the regal leader of the grounders herself. Clarke has no doubt in her mind that lesser offenses by lesser offenders have been punished by death.

As her body floods with ice at the understanding of her misstep, it’s not her own life she thinks of, but Finn’s. And then, Tris, dying on the table. She can’t let either of them die for her mistakes.

And it’s like Lexa can read her mind. She doesn’t break Clarke’s eye contact as she nods, sending one of her guards hobbling forward on a limp to search through the tool boxes against the walls. A look of agreement passes between her and Lexa and infinitesimally softens Lexa’s face, the message clear: _Save her._

Clarke tries to communicate more in that moment, assurances and desperation and supplication, but then the guard is holding out an old syringe with the protective casing intact and it pulls her back into the reality of a dying girl on the table.

Acting on instinct, Clarke rips the tubing of the syringe cover and tosses the needle away as counts Tris’s ribs with the scalpel. Finn stands at Clarke’s shoulder, breathing just as shallowly as Tris is.

“Three, four…fifth intercostal space…” That’s it. Gritting her teeth, Clarke makes the deep incision in Tris’s side and pushes the tubing in, praying as the blood begins to drain.

“C’mon,” she mutters to the girl. “You’re okay. Just breathe. You’re gonna be okay.”

_Is her breathing steadying? Is it just my wishful thinking?_

The sound of her own quiet reassurances and the strain of listening to the pattern of Tris’s breath prevent Clarke from paying any attention to the sudden chaos of voices behind her, Anya’s shouting dominant over the rest, and then the sudden sound of heavy footsteps—but she sure as hell feels it when Anya’s iron grip closes around her upper arm and rips her away from the table. Anya sends Clarke sprawling to the ground and another guard does the same to Finn when he tries to protest.

The rasp of weapons being drawn from sheaths fills the air and Clarke and Finn, crumpled heaps on the floor, stop struggling instantly.

“What did you do to her?” Anya demands, cold, low, and more threatening than anything previous.

Clarke looks past the sword tip inches from her face and appeals silently to Lexa, but the commander stands ramrod straight and the severity of her face offers no stay of execution. This is Anya’s fight and she will have no part in it.

“Anya, listen,” Clarke pants. Anya waits for whatever last words Clarke will stutter out, but none come. Instead, the room falls silent save the heavy rapid breathing of Clarke and Finn.

No choking. No death rattles.

Anya’s eyes widen the moment she realizes it. She turns so quickly to Trist that the sword tip nearly swings through Clarke’s face anyway, and then Clarke and Finn are abandoned where they lay as every eye in the room turns to see Tris breathing steadily on the table. She’s still grimacing in pain, eyes shut, but at least she sounds like she’s returning from the brink of death.

“She couldn’t breathe,” Clarke explains, feeling a similar sensation in her own chest. “I drained her lung of the fluid. I saved her. But I need to finish the work, and then you send us back to our people.”

Her response is nothing but a quiet stream of the grounder language, Anya murmuring to Tris as she hovers over her. It’s Lexa who turns to Clarke.

“I was against bringing you here, even to save Tris,” Lexa says. “But you’ve proved yourself well, Clarke of the Sky People. Finish what you need to do to save her.”

With an eye on the weapons still pointed at them—as if the grounders had the idea that Clarke and Finn were a threat—they cautiously climb to their feet. But before Clarke steps forward to check on Tris and cauterize the wound, she hesitates. “And then we go back to our people,” she says again.

“Finish the work, Clarke.”

“You _owe_ me our lives,” Clarke says, jaw tightening. “I saved hers.”

“From your own bomb,” Lexa answers coolly. “You took twenty-three on the bridge.”

“We had to protect ourselves. You would have killed a hundred.”

“She’s a kid,” Finn says suddenly as he stares at the table. “Why was she on the bridge in the first place? At the front of the charge.”

Anya answers in a snarl, still at Tris’s side: “She is my second. She was at her rightful place by my side for the attack, it’s how we train them to be warriors. She is a far better warrior than any of your—” Her voice falters, then returns full of fear. “She’s warm. Her skin should not be so hot.”

She looks to Clarke like it’s a question, looking for Clarke to correct her; the blonde completely disregards the spears and swords pointed at her and pushes forward to feel Tris’s forehead. Her forehead, then her cheeks, neck, chest… “She’s right, she’s feverish,” she tells Finn. “This isn’t right, she shouldn’t have a fever if it was just fluid in the lungs…”

The small bubble of victory and hope in her chest bursts and another crushing wave of fear washes over her as Clarke begins performing vitality checks again, reporting her findings out loud: Tris’s pulse is racing, her skin is discolored, she’s starting to shake—just tremors in the hands, at first, but her muscles begin to quiver everywhere else before long.

“What’s wrong?” Anya demands again. “What’s happening?”

“I—I don’t know,” Clarke says, desperately searching for anything that can give her that answer. “She should be calming but it’s like it’s picking up, getting worse.”

“Help her!”

“I am trying!”

“It could be internal,” Finn guesses, “Internal bleeding, making her weak.”

“It could be that, it could be anything, her blood could be septic for all we know.” Clarke pushes her hands back through her hair and lets out a growl of frustration, ignoring the fact that she’s smeared the blood on her fingers through her blonde locks. “Fuck, Finn…it’s something, something with her blood. We can’t open her up on the fucking table but we can give her a transfusion and see if it evens out. If it doesn’t, it’s internal bleeding.”

_And there won’t be anything we can do. Not with hundred year old tools in someone’s basement._

Finn nods. He knows the stakes. “Transfusion, then.”

Clarke finds the syringe from earlier as Finn searches for tubing and the rest of the grounders step back to let them work. When she turns to them with the needle prepped and asks for their arm, trying to explain about matching blood types, they fall back even farther with distrusting scowls on their faces. Finn shoves his sleeve up his arm and offers his vein instead. Clarke grows increasingly frantic as she preps him for the transfusion, the wound on her head pounding in time to her rapid heartbeat.

Finn has to say her name three times before she hears him.

“What?” she asks, looking up at him just before she inserts the needle.

He’s staring with empty eyes at Tris. “She’s not breathing.”

All of the frantic energy crashes down at once and she _knows._ She knows before she turns what she’ll find on the table and her heart constricts in a way she hasn’t felt since she watched her mother’s ship crash to earth in a ball of fire. She lost. She failed.

Slowly, Clarke lets her hand fall to her side and the needle drops to the floor—it’s a sign for the rest of grounders. It’s over. Clarke can’t look at the body on the table but she watches Anya step forward. She tries to make eye-contact with Lexa but the commander’s focus is entirely on her general as Anya places her hands on either side of Tris’s head.

“Yu gonplei ste odon.”

She produces a small knife from a hidden pocket somewhere and slices through one of Tris’s braids. Tucking the momento away, she turns to Clarke, but Lexa’s voice stops her.

“Take another…for Aden.”

Anya stiffens, but she nods and returns to Tris’s body, cutting off another braid and pocketing it. This time she hovers over Tris’s lifeless form, grief evident in the hunch of her shoulders and the dip of her head. And then:

“Take him.”

It happens faster than Clarke can react: guards who had stood so stoically throughout the operation jump to life and seize Finn with the ferocity of the predators they seem to be among the trees, shoving her away like she’s nothing more than a ragdoll when she tries to stop them. Finn shouts and kicks as they drag him through the door, yelling Clarke’s name, but she’s held back by the grounder with the limp. It's like fighting a wall, the way her fists against his back make no impact and when she goes for his face, he catches her wrists effortlessly.  Her weakness just makes her rage even more.

_If she dies, he dies._

Lexa and Anya follow Finn and the guards through the door: Anya looks back at Clarke, and at Tris, with a stony face. Lexa doesn’t look back at all, even as Clarke’s cries echo through the room.

 

* * * * *

 

When her mother’s exodus ship had crashed to the ground, so had she. Her legs gave out and she dropped to her knees in the dirt, breath whooshing out of her chest and ribcage too tight to draw in another inhale, and ice-cold numbness tingling all the way to the tips of her toes. She embraced that numbness. She gave herself thirty seconds to stare at the way the fire from the crash lit up the black mountains in waves of red and orange, and then she embraced the rush of cold and let it kill any pain that might threaten to send her crashing to her knees again, because if that happened, she would never stand up. Not to mention, Bellamy was watching, and she couldn’t afford to show weakness.

This time, it’s a grounder watching her and it’s Finn dying, but the technique is universal. She breathes slowly and deliberately and lets the numbness kill her thoughts, more potent than moonshine. The task of organizing and reorganizing the surgery tools distracts her.

The grounder finally speaks up behind her, after several minutes. “She won’t kill you,” he says. “The commander.”

“She should,” Clarke replies simply.

“Our healer died in the blast. You’ll have the opportunity again to prove your worth, and be welcomed among us.”

“What about my people? Will I be able to go back to see them?”

He is silent for another long moment. “Tomorrow there will be nothing and no one to go back to.”

Her fingers, suddenly warm, close around the scalpel she had used on Tris. She turns to him, folding in on herself as she tries to meet his eyes.

“Those marks on Tris’s shoulder…what were they?” she asks.

“Each scar marks a kill in combat.”

“Five kills?” Anger shocks through her numbness. “She was a little girl.”

As if insulted, the grounder draws himself up taller, head and shoulders above Clarke. “She was brave.”

“How many do you have?” she asks, stepping closer, furrowing her brow.

He pulls at the collar of his shirt to reveal a chest scarred almost beyond recognition with mottled, raised skin. He grins with pride at the jolt it gives her. “And half were after I hurt my knee. When the Ice Nation marched—”

Clarke doesn’t hear what happened when the Ice Nation marched because she makes her decision in a split second—she lashes out with a kick to his knee that cripples him and sends him stumbling to the ground. And a second later, unflinching, she opens a gash through his neck with the scalpel in her hand. The blood spatters and he tumbles back, choking, more surprise than pain on his face. Without hesitation Clarke lunges forward and presses her hand over his mouth to silence him.

She stares into his eyes as he dies and tries to recall the numbness so that she doesn’t have to feel this. But she does.

Outside, there are no guards. Clarke waits at the entrance to the small shack and strains for any sound of human activity, but hears nothing but the forest—an ominous sound on its own now. She keeps the scalpel clutched tight in her hand, and then, taking several steeling breaths, she bursts through the door and runs.

She doesn’t get far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was another chapter of a rewrite of what we've already seen on the show, but it's a necessary set-up and it lays the foundation for the type of relationship I want to explore between several characters. Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, and thank you for the love :) Constructive criticism, comments, support, it's all madly appreciated. All mistakes are mine.

The grounder traps are designed for animals, both predator and prey. They’re probably effective against enemy grounders as well, if they’re hidden well enough. Clarke is neither animal nor grounder, and she’s in the dark to boot. She sprints through the forest, racing between the hulking shadows of the trunks, trying to remember the route home and searching desperately for a landmark—the traps aren’t the first thing on her mind.

And then with a snap and a hiss, the world lurches out from under her and rattles her brain against her skull, a snare tight around her ankle. She blacks out just as she makes sense of the feeling of weightlessness. Just like that, she’s captive again.

 

* * * * *

 

When she comes to, she’s already groaning. It rises into a snarl when she opens her eyes to the blinding bright light of a campfire in the night—she has to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden searing pain, which doubles the pounding of the concussion in her head. Clarke lets out a choked sob of pain. She turns her face into the dirt—she’s laying on her side, wrists and ankles bound—and tries to grimace back the hot tears of frustration that jump to her eyes.

Her shout of pain must alert someone nearby. She doesn’t bother to open her eyes but she can hear footsteps crunching through the dirt towards her, hear several muttered conversations around the camp fall silent. A shadow passes over her face as the footsteps stop between her and the fire. When whoever it is remains there for several seconds, motionless, Clarke opens her eyes again.

The commander stands over her, looking down, just a silhouette against the bright light. But her shape is unmistakable.

Clarke watched Tris die. She felt the guard’s life drain out over her fingers. She struggled useless as Finn was dragged out of the room to his death. Something about it all ignites something in her—she feels calloused now, rough and unflinching. Twelve hours ago, her silence was acceptance. Now, she looks up at Lexa with her silence as the last bastion of her defiance.

They stare at each other for a long moment. “Twenty-five, now, Clarke of the Sky People. That’s more than anyone has achieved at once since I took command.”

“Eighteen on my side,” Clarke says. “Nineteen with Finn.”

Lexa nods. “Blood must have blood.”

It’s nothing but math, or a chess game. A pawn for a rook, a bishop for a night. The queen presiding over it. The softness of Lexa’s tone makes her sound apologetic—if not for the deaths, than for the situation. Clarke nods into the dirt.

“Would you like to sit up?” Lexa asks after a moment. When Clarke doesn’t reply, Lexa understands the answer and retreats.

Gradually, Clarke’s eyes adjust to the firelight, and the shadowy outlines of grounders resolve themselves from the darkness—they loung around the camp, some on boulders, some against trees, some in bedrolls beside the fire, all languid, but never far from their weapons. They’re not wearing their human skull war marks anymore either, but the orange glow of the fire deepens their eye sockets and scars to make them look just as inhuman.

The fire provides a small bubble of light in the forest clearing, but it only goes so far. The tree trunks disappear into darkness above them, and in every direction outside the camp, there’s nothing but blackness. She has no idea where she is and no light beyond to help her. Escape is not an option—but that doesn’t stop her from struggling at the bonds behind her back. The ropes are just as damning as the situation itself and she fights anyway, searching for a way out.

Clarke turns her attention to the center of the camp and the group of grounders who stand in conversation, Lexa and Anya among them. She can’t understand their words but the tones of rising tension and the sounds of angry voices interrupting each other transcend language. They are a sudden ray of hope in the darkness.

She thinks briefly of Tris before calling out, “Commander.” Lexa turns. Clarke adds, “And General, you too,” and the three others turn as well.

“I’d like to speak to you,” Clarke manages, even with all of them glaring at her.

A taller, bald man spits. “Captured enemies don’t get that privilege.”

“When was the last time you captured one, Tristan?” Anya says drily.

“I don’t capture them because I kill them.”

“Enough,” growls a hulking figure, bigger by far than the other three. “With luck soon we will have enough enemies to worry about killing or capturing. For now, we are looking at a small fish in the entire ocean.”

 “All of you, silence,” Lexa commands over her shoulder, for she is already striding across the clearing to Clarke. Her generals obey and fall into step behind her, drawing close to her shoulders to look down at the leader of the Sky People, staring up at them from the ground. “What is it, Clarke?”

The use of English among the generals, and now the way her name sounds from Lexa’s lips, seem almost a mockery of her. Not one she’ll lower herself to fighting.

“I’d like to sit up, now,” she says.

If the clipped way Lexa had said Clarke’s name was a mockery, the overly-sincere request of a petulant prisoner is a bigger one. Lexa stares at her as if Clarke just told a terrible joke, then gestures for two nearby guards to lift Clarke into a sitting position.

“Is that all?”

“No.” Clarke raises her chin. “Take me back to my people.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Lexa’s jaw works side-to-side. She does not like to be taunted. “Because we are at war with your people.”

“Then you’re at war with _me_ , and it makes no sense to keep me alive.”

But she knows Lexa saw the struggle Clarke pushed through in the basement with Tris, and she knows Lexa understood it—that is what’s keeping Clarke alive right now. Lexa saw something in her. So did Anya, in the seconds before Tris slipped beyond help. Clarke has no doubt that this is the source of the sound of frustration that had been coming from the group earlier, and now she has to find a way to use it to her advantage.

“What happened at the bridge was a mistake,” Clarke begins. “My people shouldn’t have attacked but don’t let one mistake throw us all into war. You saw how I could be of value.”

Tristan has a knife gleaming in his hand before she can finish. “You _aren’t_ of value, Sky Girl,” he growls, crouching to draw it against her neck. “You—”

“ _Heda!”_ The shout comes from the forest canopy above. “Azgeda, to the east!”

The whole camp freezes. The hairs on the back of Clarke’s neck stand up at the word: _Azgeda._ It feels like the knife pressed against her skin.

Hands drop to weapons and hold with white-knuckle grips; Lexa and the grounders turn wide searching eyes to the boundaries of camp and wait. Even Tristan seems to forget he’s holding a blade to a prisoner—he sits completely motionless before Clarke, staring into the darkness. As if the grounders can see better than she can.

They wait, for what feels like several minutes. Clarke doesn’t breathe, not least because any movement of her throat would cause the blade to split her skin.

“Azgeda!” comes the shout again, this time much closer and accompanied by a _whoosh_ as a grounder descends from the trees above on a rope. He jumps the last several feet and lands heavily, panting for breath before quickly assembling himself and standing tall for his Commander.

“Gouva klin,” Lexa demands, hand on her sword.

“Azgeda gonakru,” he says between breaths, and points to the east. “Close.”

Lexa exchanges a dark look with Anya: when Anya nods once, Lexa jumps into action.

The moment she rips her sword from its sheath, the sound is echoed by warriors all around camp—she issues an incomprehensible shout and they jolt to life, lurching from their bedrolls and dropping from the trees above and scrambling for the supplies, swarming through the camp, their eyes gleaming for the coming fight and focused on the treeline and the darkness just outside the circle of firelight. Clarke strains to hear the sounds of an approaching threat, but her ears aren’t tuned like that of a warrior’s, and besides, she can’t hear anything over the sudden pounding of blood as panic rushes through her.

“So, Tristan,” Anya calls, grinning as she twirls her two swords. “You try to kill, I’ll capture. We’ll see how many we end with.”

“False confidence, Anya kom Trikru.”

Their verbal sparring smacks of bloodthirsty delight, but Lexa alone remains solemn. She points her sword at Clarke and gestures for the two guards to pull her to her feet. As the warriors finish breaking down the camp, they assemble in a defensive position in front of Lexa, and then in front of Clarke as Lexa strides close to the leader of the Sky People.

“Anya,” Lexa says to her general. “You, Tristan, and I will lead the majority into the caves above; three guards will take Clarke to Indra’s camp near the fast water. When Azgeda follow that group, we ambush. Then we meet up with the first group and Indra, Aden, and the others are waiting to return to Polis.”

She turns her green eyes on Clarke at these last words and Clarke shakes her head in surprise when she realizes that she’s understanding Lexa because she’s speaking English—for Clarke’s benefit.

“I—I don’t get it, I don’t understand—”

“You are my prisoner, and you are of benefit to me, Clarke.” With one swipe, Lexa cuts through the ropes that bind Clarke’s ankles. “It would be a waste to allow you to fall into Azgeda control. Get to the camp at the river where my detachment waits.”

Lexa spins and repeats the instructions in the grounder language to Clarke’s two guards and the archer who brought word of the Azgeda warriors. Then, with a snarl that is eerily reminiscent of a smirk, she gives a different, bloodier command in Trigedasleng. Anya licks her bared teeth. Her warriors cheer, raising their weapons—in that moment, Clarke gets why a girl who can’t be much older than her commands an entire people. She seems godlike, inspiring and chilling all at once.

Lexa turns flashing green eyes to Clarke one last time. Gives one last command.

_“Run.”_

 

* * * * *

 

Two of Clarke’s three assigned escorts tear off into the darkness ahead of her, falling back only when they realize that she doesn’t move like a predator, leaping logs and rocks and ditches the way they do but instead stumbling through them; she barely dodges the dark shapes of trees in time. The guards return to her side, growling low streams of their language that sound suspiciously like insults. But she doesn’t care. She’s not even listening. Clarke runs with everything she has, her newly freed legs fueled by the feeling of the word _Azgeda_ and the way even Lexa and her mighty warriors had stiffened at the call.

They careen through the forest and Clarke trusts them implicitly, somehow, to lead her to safety—just by virtue of the fact that they’re running alongside her. When one grounder stops suddenly ahead of them and throws up his hand, Clarke skids to a stop as well, dropping to a crouch, waiting for his command.

They wait like that, breaths fogging in the darkness, while the grounder ahead scouts up and down the creek ahead of them. They can follow it to the river. Clarke nearly has her breath back when the grounder beside her reaches over and grips her arm. She glances at him—and recognizes the eyes behind the mask.

“ _Lincoln?”_

There’s a grunt of confusion from her other side. “Lincoln kom TonDC?”

Lincoln’s eyes flash and he lunges past her, hitting the grounder behind Clarke in a tackle before he can say another word. The man’s head hits the tree and he drops to a motionless heap but Lincoln is already sprinting on silent feet to the man ahead of them. This time there’s a flash of silver in moonlight and a sharp cry of pain before the second grounder falls.

Lincoln returns to Clarke, pulling off the mask as he comes. “Come on. We don’t have time. The group of Azgeda I lured to Lexa won’t last long against her and her warriors; we have to get you and Finn back to camp before they come after us.”

_“Finn?”_

“He’s alive,” Lincoln says. “But he won’t be for long, if they find him first.”

Clarke’s legs go numb with the shock of relief and she nearly stumbles as they start to run, but Lincoln’s hand catches her under her arm and drags her upright again.

This run feels shorter, because Clarke isn’t fully registering the world blurring past around her; it feels like just seconds later that Lincoln slows and they emerge into a small clearing with a fire built up against several large boulders that shield it from sight. At their approach, a body curled by the fire unfolds itself and stands.

“Finn!”

Clarke throws herself into his arms, every inch of his living, breathing, unharmed body a source of the soaring relief in her chest. She didn’t get him killed. Finn pulls back to look at her, speechless with the same relief and disbelief that she feels for him.

There’s something else in his eyes, too, but she doesn’t linger on it. Since Raven, she hasn’t wanted to give it thought.

Lincoln’s quiet cough behind them gets their attention. “We have to go. We have to get you back to your camp,” he says. “You all have to be gone by sunrise.”

“How did you—” Clarke trails off helplessly because it feels like Lincoln brought Finn back from the dead.

“He killed two of his own people to save me,” Finn says.

“He killed one for me too.”

“There’s no time for this,” Lincoln says, more insistently, as he stamps out the fire. “They have horses. We don’t.”

“Well what do we have?” Finn says. “We’ll never make it back to camp in time.”

“Caves. Let’s go.”

They set off again, at a run, but don’t get far before they hear the distant clatter of horses at full gallop; seconds later, the whoops and war cries of their riders reach their ears.

“They’re hunting,” Lincoln hisses, doubling his speed.

“We can’t outrun them,” Finn groans. “The camp is miles away.”

“Caves. We’re almost there. They won’t follow because of the reapers.”

Clarke has no idea what Lincoln means or what reapers are or why the caves are a way home or even a refuge from the danger, but when Anya’s raw-throated cry of _“Lincoln!”_ tears through the trees, Clarke is willing to follow Lincoln to the ends of the earth to escape it. The horses sound thunderous now, beasts with more terrifying riders bearing down on them, just out of sight when they look back, cheering for the blood of easy targets. Lincoln pours on speed and surges ahead of them, towards a wall of exposed rock on a hillside. Clarke and Finn don’t stop running; Lincoln pulls back a curtain of foliage to reveal a crevice in the rock and they barrel through it without hesitation.

She may as well have gone blind. Facing the dank, freezing darkness of the cave, Clarke almost wishes she were back in the moonlight, staring defiantly at Lexa. They run blindly through the cave for several seconds, finally stopping when they hear no sounds of pursuit.

Finn’s hand finds her in the darkness. He’s sweating and gasping for air just like she is. Lincoln’s breathing is slow and even and shallow—but it’s also the only other sound in the cave. No footsteps behind them. No war cries. No threats. They’re alone.

“They stopped,” Clarke says, awed.

“We’re not worth facing the reapers who use these tunnels,” Lincoln replies. “Plus, they know where we’re going.”

The darkness is filled with several loud clicks, flashes of sparks, and then a whooshing sound as fire roars to life at the end of a torch in Lincoln’s hand. The cave lights up with an orange glow; Clarke looks over her shoulder in fear, but their pursuers really did stop at the cave entrance. The cave is not so much a cave but a tunnel—the remnants of ancient mining cart tracks run along the floor into the darkness up ahead, and all along the walls, rusted lanterns dot the rock.

“These caves lead us back to camp?”

“And what the hell is a reaper?” Finn adds.

Lincoln stares into the fire for a moment, before his voice darkens. “Pray you never find out. Let’s keep moving.”

At the very least, they’re not sprinting anymore. Lincoln hurries but the pace allows Clarke to recover her breath and recognize the lactic acid built up in her muscles. She hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, for so long she can’t remember the last time she rested. Her body is surviving on will power alone. She’s killed to survive now, for the first time. She’s not letting that go easy.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks Lincoln, after they’ve passed several minutes in silence. They pass several more, before he answers.

“Because what my people are doing to yours is wrong,” he says finally. “And because it will only lead to more war. You were right, on the bridge. If your people come down to find you dead, thousands will die in the war to come.”

“Our people don’t want that, though,” Finn says. “We’re just trying to survive. We would have died on the Ark, we had no choice but to come down here.”

Lincoln nods. “That’s why you’re leaving, as soon as you get back to your camp.”

Clarke stops short and Lincoln turns in exasperation. “Where are we gonna go? If we leave, and our families come down, it’ll be the same result. War.”

“You leaving will buy you time,” he presses. “Lexa won’t pursue you to the ocean. Her strongest allies in the Lake People have withdrawn to the south; Azgeda’s patrols sweep closer Polis every day. There’s a war on her doorstep. She was hoping to dispatch of you quickly before it all falls apart. Because it will. But now, you’ll have time to get to Luna, and through her, you can negotiate for peace again, before your families come down. We can stop a war between your people and mine.”

His words sound crazed, desperate in their idealism, even more so than Finn’s talk of peace; but there’s nothing but seriousness in his dark eyes, and Clarke finds herself nodding.

“How do we get to Luna?”

This, he chuckles at. “Go east until you can’t anymore. That’s where she is.”

“Simple enough,” Finn says with a snort.

“It better be. Your survival depends on it.”

There are so many questions they could ask to keep Lincoln talking— _where when why is it safer why is everyone fighting is there any other choice—_ but Lincoln is intent on his path forward, eyes boring into the darkness ahead, so Clarke and Finn follow suit. One foot after the other. If this is what they need to do to survive, follow orders, so be it.

They’re so attuned to their surroundings, every scrape of a footstep or every new inch of tunnel floor revealed by the light of Lincoln’s torch, that the instant they hear a new sound up ahead, all three stiffen up at once.

There’s someone in the tunnel. Rustling in the darkness.

A low growl sounds ahead of them, something part human and part…not. “Reapers,” Lincoln whispers, crouching, and Clarke understands why Anya didn’t pursue them into the cave.

“What now?” she murmurs. Finn takes a protective step forward as if he’s going to fight whatever comes out of the shadows.

“Now you run back to your camp,” Lincoln orders. “Take the tunnel on the right. Don’t stop—get there before Lexa and Anya’s scouts do.”

“What about you?”

“I’m gonna lead them away.” Before they can protest, he pulls his sketchbook from his pocket and presses it into Finn’s palm. “This’ll get you out of the caves, and then to Luna. And—” his voice breaks a little as he unhooks his sword from his back and hands it to Clarke. “For Octavia.”

“Thank you,” Clarke gasps. He knows it’s not for the sword.

“Stay to the right, then get your people and get to the ocean before any more lives are lost.”

 

 * * * * *

 

The run blindly through the tunnels, their only instruction being stay right, and they don’t stop to breathe until they burst out of the cave and into the blinding sunlight. Clarke raises her eyes to the trees first: the familiarity of it all nearly knocks Clarke to her knees. _Home._ Lincoln’s map got them home. The cold rain on her skin and the colder air doesn’t even register as they breathe deeply the forest they’ve come to know

Shouts of “the gate, open the gate, _it’s Finn and Clarke!”_ greet them minutes later when the dropship camp appears between the trees. The voices of her friends are the second thing that threatens to drive Clarke to her knees in relief. The walls are as high as ever, gunners ready to snap, gate open to welcome them home—Clarke and Finn barrel into camp, exhausted and shaking and soaked to the bone, to the awe of every delinquent in sight.

She hears a gasped, “Thank god,” and Jasper hits her in a hug. The others come running too—Bellamy, Octavia, Miller, Harper. “Where have you been?” Jasper demands when he pulls away. “Where’s Monty?”

“Monty’s gone?”

“Clarke, we need to leave, _now_ ,” Finn interrupts. He turns to the rest of the camp, raising his voice. “All of us do. There is an army of grounders marching on this camp—we need to pack what we can, and run.”

Bellamy, lips curling in a snarl, draws himself to his full height. “Like hell we do! We knew this was coming! We stay; we fight. That’s what we’ve been preparing for! Where can we go that is safer than here?”

“There’s an ocean to the east; Lincoln said the people there will help us.”

“Oh, the grounder told you that?” Bellamy growls.

But Octavia steps forward, face twisted in concern. “Lincoln? Is he okay?”

“He saved us,” Clarke says. She hands Octavia Lincoln’s sword; as Octavia accepts it, the memento of Lincoln awakens something in her, changing her concern to determination. “He got us back here safely and told us to get to the ocean.”

“Then that’s where we go,” Octavia says, looking to Bellamy and clutching the sword the same way he holds his rifle.

Doubt ripples through the kids around them, and murmurs of concern drift into the air. Seeing that he’s losing his grip on the camp, Bellamy jumps forward to gain their attention.

“Not a chance!” He spreads his arms wide to the dropship camp, making eye-contact with each and every delinquent, pleading with them in a roaring declaration. “This is our home now! We built it from nothing with our bare hands! Our dead are buried behind that wall in this ground! Our ground! The grounders think they can take that away? They think that because we came from the sky, we don't belong here! But they're yet to realize one very important thing: _we are on the ground now_. And that means _we_ are grounders!”

“Grounders with guns!” someone bellows. The crowd shouts their approval.

“Damn right!” Bellamy roars. “I say, let them come. We’ve survived this far; we can take on anything.”

These kids look to him. They believe in him—and for good reason. Bellamy believes himself, trusts his strength, trusts his gun and his hands and his teeth; he will do whatever it takes to survive. He’s a protector, a warrior, one of the few who will fight even when he can’t even stand. That passion has the delinquents willing to fight and die for him.

But then Clarke thinks of Lexa and her speech to her warriors, the way her voice alone demanded not the sacrifice of her warriors, but the blood of their enemies. She inspired them not to lay down their lives, but to spill blood for her. As much as she wanted, until she was satisfied. Bellamy can inspire their group of delinquents to defend their ground but he is not _of_ the Earth the way Lexa is; Commander Lexa is as vengeful and dangerous and war-scarred as the Earth itself, and the Earth is not something they can battle back. The delinquents look to her with hope in their eyes at Bellamy’s words and wait for her agreement, her inspiring speech, and all she feels is a pang of affection for them. Kids from the sky, sent down to face hell. She can’t put them through that anymore.

“Bellamy’s right,” Clarke declares. “We may never find a place as safe as this right now. But it’s not safe enough for what’s out there. We built these walls and buried our dead but the grounders were here first, the grounders were here longer, and if we stay, _we die_. Tonight.

“But if we run, we still have a chance to survive in this world. So pack your things. Whatever you can carry. _Now._ ”

The rising tide of support in the camp vanishes at her words and every eye turns to Bellamy, waiting for him to quell the sudden waves of doubt again. He stares at Clarke for a long moment but she doesn’t back down or look away, like he’s willing her to. She has made this decision and stands firm.

After a long moment, Bellamy’s jaw twitches and he looks down and away. It’s a signal to the entire camp.

At his acquiescence, they jump to life, following Clarke’s orders—the ones that triumphed. They work like a well-oiled machine, breaking down the tents, packing the food, distributing weapons, putting it all together in packs small enough to be slung over shoulders and strapped onto litters made from saplings. It’s impressive—Clarke thinks for a moment that maybe they could hold the grounders off, maybe Bellamy’s battle plans would work. Then the thoughts of Lexa return, and she knows they wouldn’t stand a chance.

 

* * * * *

 

The first indication that this won’t work comes in the form of Raven’s weak voice, straining over the sound of the rain and the bustle around camp: _“Help me.”_

She leans heavily against a post, face contorted in pain as she wavers on her feet. Bellamy races past Clarke and catches Raven when she takes a step toward him and collapses; Finn arrives a second later and Bellamy relinquishes Raven into Finn’s arms. His hands comes away red with Raven’s blood as Finn and Octavia get her inside.

“What happened?” Clarke demands, looking to Bellamy for an explanation. Everything fell apart while she was gone.

He’s staring at the spot where Finn and Raven disappeared into the dropship. “Murphy shot her, Murphy did this!” he stammers out, shaking his head. Clarke can’t waste time on Bellamy’s guilt, so she leaves him standing in the rain and follows Raven and Finn inside. Somewhere behind her, Bellamy turns and shouts for the camp to pick up the pace and be ready to leave as soon as possible.

“No one else is dying here!” he bellows.

Inside the dropship, Raven writhes on the cot they put her on, simultaneously shaking with the pain and claiming that she’s fine to travel, that they can get away. “I’m not dying,” she spits, “I can move.”

“The bullet is still in her spine,” Clarke whispers to Finn, chest aching with fear and dread as if she’s been shot too. “If she moves, it could do real damage.”

But if she doesn’t move, she dies here, in the metal coffin of the dropship. Finn and Connor fashion a stretcher for Raven to carry her, regardless of how it will slow them down—and Raven, gritting her teeth through her pain, makes a joke about finally getting treated like a princess.

 

* * * * *

 

They get two hundred yards from camp when Jax falls, an axe blade sprouted suddenly from his head.

_They’re here._

That’s the second indication that this won’t work.

In the mad scramble back to camp, the gunners fire blindly into the trees to cover the retreat and they only lose one more delinquent before they get behind the walls—he falls to a spear and they don’t have time to grab his body.

“Their scouts are here,” Clarke gasps to Finn once the gate slams shut behind them.

He refuses to accept that; there’s still fire in his eyes. “There can’t be that many, we can get around them!”

“I agree with Finn,” Octavia chimes in. “The only place we’ll be safe is where Lincoln wanted us to go. We can still do this.”

Clarke feels like she’s been running for days, and part of her still yearns to go. They could make it—but at what cost? Her gaze shifts to Bellamy, who waits in forced, jaw-clenched silence, and gives him a questioning look.

“We tried running,” he says, “And now Drew and Anson are dead. You wanna end up like them? Axe in the head? We can go out again and get picked off out in the open, or we can stand, and fight.”

“Clarke—” Finn tries, reading her face.

“It’s too late, Finn.” With a final look out to the forest and the enemy that is without a doubt moving toward them from miles away, Clarke clambers down from the battlements and faces up with Bellamy. “You have your fight.”

* * * * *

 

500 rounds of ammo. 25 rifles. A partially mined gully. A handful of makeshift grenades. And, if worst comes to worst, they’ll take shelter in the dropship.

That’s the third indication that this is bound to fail.

Clarke stares at the model of the camp and listens to Bellamy rattle off their numbers, heart sinking. Bellamy somehow manages to sound hopeful, and Finn looks around at them all with a grim, set eyes and a determined expression. Raven, bullet in her spine, is the only one who seems like she’s accepted their fate. Clarke has never felt more connected to her than in this moment. They may go out in a blaze of glory, one even Raven’s tendency for pyrotechnics would appreciate, but it doesn’t change the end result.

Raven stifles a groan—only Clarke catches it—and it’s clear that being sidelined is burning her alive.

That’s when the idea to save them all clicks into place in Clarke’s mind.

“Raven…there’s fuel in the dropship, isn’t there? Enough to lift off?”

_Raven’s tendency for pyrotechnics._ Bellamy and Finn exchange confused glances, but Raven gets it. She meets Clarke’s gaze: a grin spreads over her features.

 

* * * * *

 

_“East woods, east woods!”_

_“I got one!”_

_“Two just hit a mine!”_

_“We need help on the north side!”_

_“Harper, your left!”_

_“They got Andi!”_

Clarke hears the entire battle on the radio, each tiny triumph and defeat, punctuated by the crackle of gunfire—all she can do is try to keep her emotions from swinging too high or too low with each update over the walkies, as she tries to keep her fingers steady on the wires in the bowels of the dropship. She’s been down here for nearly an hour with the battle raging on outside. The adrenaline keeps her from feeling the way her body, bent double in the crawlspace, has locked up while she has been trying to repair a rocket for takeoff only by Raven’s instructions from above and Jasper’s vague memories of being intoxicated during his engineering classes.

Those instructions only last so long. Raven stops responding, slipping into unconsciousness, and they’re down to fifteen year old, scared, wide-eyed Jasper to rewire the ship.

_“Raven, come on,”_ Clarke murmurs as she hovers over Raven’s lifeless body. “We need you. Please.”

Raven has a pulse, but it’s fluttering, dangerously light and fast. Another one she can’t save. “Raven, come on,” she pleads again, selfish and begging. In the background, Miller is screaming at her: it takes several seconds of noise before Clarke registers the words. 

“Clarke! Fuck, Clarke! We need to close the door, they’re getting through!”

He’s not the only one desperate. The rest of her friends, most of them, have crowded into the dropship as well. All their methods failed to fight back the grounders. The loss of Raven like a knife twist in her stomach, Clarke barely manages to steel herself as she crosses the room to put her hand on the lever.

 

* * * * *

 

Her last image before the dropship door closes is of Bellamy and Finn, fighting barehanded against one massive grounder. The gate is down and the grounders flood in like it’s a burst dam, ignoring the individual stragglers of delinquents that haven’t made it to the dropship, and heading straight for the heart of the defense. Anya leads the charge.

Clarke can’t wait any longer. She looks to Bellamy and Finn, sees the understanding in their eyes; then pulls the lever with her own eyes closed, as though it will make it less real.

With a roar, Anya throws herself through the narrowing gap of the dropship entrance and tumbles to the ground. She’s up in a half second, just enough time to pull her swords out, but it’s one against dozens. After a moment’s hesitation, the kids descend on her, Miller swinging in with a pipe that knocks Anya to the ground again. Her swords clatter away; she disappears beneath their surging attack.

Anya, the grounder general, concussed and being beaten to death on the ground by a bunch of vengeful kids.

“Stop!” Clarke cries, a gut reaction when Miller pulls out a knife. She grabs his wrist.

“What the fuck, Clarke?”

“We are _not_ grounders,” she shouts to the group—they’re stunned into silence, and at her glare, they back away from Anya, motionless on the floor. Her eyes are cloudy and dull when she looks up at Clarke. “Tie her up.”

 

* * * * * 

 

The grounders are still attacking outside. They’ve reached the dropship. The metal walls ring and groan as the attacks pile on from outside. Bellamy and Finn are still out there. Octavia is nowhere to be found. The bodies of their fallen friends lay all around camp. And the grounders…the grounders will be dead before they know it.

But the living are in the dropship, all looking to Clarke. They have no choice.

“Jasper, now!” she commands.

 

* * * * *

 

The rockets fire.

 

* * * * *

 

After she sets the world on fire outside comes the realization that they have to wait for it to burn down before they can escape the dropship. Anya, concussed and defeated by the knowledge of her warriors incinerated outside, still struggles against her captors—it takes six of them to hold her down and bind her with seatbelts.

It doesn't feel like a victory. It doesn't feel like a defeat either. It doesn't feel like anything. Clarke sits lost in the grayness of her own thoughts for what feels like hours, until Anya heaves a heavy sigh and Clarke’s attention snaps to her.

“I’d like to talk now,” Anya says, when their eyes meet. Anya’s flash with something dark and sardonic. Gallows humor with the only one who would get it. Clarke has a certain respect for that. It flickers in the darkness of what she just did, and the darkness of the loss Anya just suffered.

“Prisoners don’t get to talk,” Miller snarls.

“And how many prisoners have you taken, Miller?” Clarke asks, voice heavy with exhaustion.

“If it were my choice, she’d be dead.”

“Well, it’s not your choice.”

When Miller stands down, sulking, Anya speaks up again: “The Commander won’t forgive this. You burned 300 of her warriors.”

It should be a threat—three hours ago, before the battle, it would have been. But right now, with Clarke’s head tipped back against the wall and her eyes closed, she can’t bring herself to think of anything so green and alive as Lexa. Everything outside of the dropship isn’t real. She doesn’t respond to Anya’s taunt, and Anya doesn’t have it in her to spout off any more.

Time passes in seething silence until the world outside is quiet again; the heat and smoke outside have disappeared beneath a fresh rain that beats against the tin can of the dropship. The delinquents start to get restless. Clarke gives the nod to open the door, dreading the sight she knows is waiting for her: Anya’s warriors, Lexa’s people, perhaps kids even younger than Tris, the bodies of Clarke’s own people who didn’t make it in the dropship or fell before they closed the doors. Bellamy. Finn. Selfishly, she hopes that the fire was enough to obliterate all traces of everything, so that she could imagine, like with her mother, that they were never really there.

It wasn’t enough.

Charred bodies lay everywhere, unrecognizable as Grounders or Sky People, and now she understands why Lincoln and Finn wanted their peace talks. She glances back at her people, stepping tentatively out of the dropship, hollow-eyed at the sight of it all.

She’s in such shock that when the gas canisters hiss over the walls and land at her feet, issuing red smoke, she can’t even react. She stares at them blankly. And then the world wobbles dangerously…and flips sideways. Clarke is thrown from her feet and lands on her side, in the ashes of the soldiers she killed.

“The mountain men,” Anya groans, just before Clarke blacks out on the image of a gas mask and a gun in her face.

 

 * * * * *

 

Clarke Griffin wakes in a locked white cell. After her memories shock through her vision, she knows she should be aching, exhausted, dead. But she’s not. She’s numb. Dry. Clean. Warm. Blinking against the bright, artificial light—light like the Ark, but without the machine hum of life support, without the feeling of being safe. And home. It takes her several seconds to realize that she is not, in fact, dead, or hallucinating.

And once she is convinced of her own existence, the primal desire to fight and preserve that existence reignites in her chest and begins to burn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is essentially the end of the novelization of events in the show--things branch out from here. Due to a combination of my not liking writing battle scenes, plus everyone already understanding what happened in the show, I opted for a less connected, less complete, more chaotic translation of the season 1 finale, to get through it. Otherwise it would have taken another 10k words. 
> 
> As I said, the novelization pretty much ends here and it'll be smoother from here out.
> 
> Thanks again for the support and constructive criticism :)


	4. Chapter 4

Clarke has been on the ground for 28 days. She’s fought a bloody, desperate struggle to survive against threats she never could have imagined and still doesn’t understand. She feels like she’s lived three lifetimes in those 28 days, with blood in her teeth and under her nails and behind her eyelids whenever she tries to sleep. She’s grown up, and grown harder.

28 days on the ground is enough to know that something is wrong about Mount Weather.

It’s the fact that she holds a shard of glass to Maya’s neck and just hours later Maya mumbles something about not pressing charges—the idea of a weighted justice system does not seem real when just outside the concrete walls, her friends were being speared through the chest.

It’s the fact that Dante Wallace smiles placidly at her in reassurance and promises her safety and food and medical care while asking nothing in return.

It’s the fact that eighty of her friends stood to fight the grounders and only 48 came to Mount Weather. Bellamy, Finn, Raven, Octavia—her rocks—are all missing. The 47 others who did make it, though, are happy and smiling and secure. And clean. That may be the strangest part of all of this.

It’s the guards who carry side arms at all times, even while they laugh and jest with residents who never drop their smiles.

It’s the fact that they carry a body with a bullet hole into the mountain, and hours later, that bullet hole has become an arrow wound and Clarke is questioning her sanity. Her friends have been questioning it for days, as she scribbles the outlines of hidden rooms and possible escape routes on the friendly map she was given. Clarke is wild-eyed and frenzied and mistrustful as a captured wild animal, and her friends are eating chocolate cake and whispering about her in low voices.

They had been the same way after the dropship crash, too, and she had joined them despite the creeping feeling of dread that lived in her spine for those first glorious days on Earth. That was before they realized they weren’t alone and twenty of their own had been killed, and probably more in the battle, and now Clarke has learned. Inside Mount Weather, that creeping feeling of dread has become a constant throbbing force in her chest, as impossible to escape and as integral to her continued existence as her own heartbeat. That’s the force that drives her, that whispers _escape_ every hour of the day. It only gets louder the longer she goes without finding the source of the vague sense of menace that hangs in the reconditioned air of Mount Weather.

Nothing, however, prepares her for what she finds when she breaks into the harvest chamber.

Dread becomes full-on revulsion when her vision adjusts to the strange blue light and she sees the bodies hanging upside down from the ceiling, arterial catheters sprouting from their skin and draining their blood into pipes on the walls. Her sharpened senses, honed by twenty-eight days of survival, deaden with shock as she drifts down the rows of cages, weakened and gaunt grounders locked inside.

The sight of Anya, empty-eyed and frail where she had once been proud and terrifying, wakes her up just enough to grab a crowbar; somehow she breaks Anya out of her cage and pulls her into a side room just before the Mount Weather doctors enter the chamber.

Anya, swaying on her feet, shivering in the cold, looks at Clarke and opens her mouth to speak. Then the floor drops out from beneath them.

It’s surreal. Clarke thinks, for several minutes after they crash into an empty mining cart and she’s staring up at tunnel walls, that she’s dreaming, that she’s back with Finn and Lincoln trying to get to camp before Anya and the other grounder generals do. But Anya is beside her, with the same hazy-eyed lack of comprehension as Clarke feels. None of this makes sense.

“The reapers use these tunnels,” Anya mutters with an uncharacteristic fear, almost exactly the way Lincoln had said the same a lifetime ago, and it doesn’t help Clarke’s questioning of her reality. Mount Weather and the reapers.

Then, the faces of her friends still in the mountain burst clearly into her mind. The voice that whispered a constant refrain of _escape_ changes now: _Save them. Save them. Save them._

“Anya, we have to get out of here,” Clarke breathes. She helps Anya scramble out of the mining cart and stand on shaking legs. But the moment Clarke tugs her away from the cart, Anya stands firm.

“I won’t leave my people behind.”

Of course she won’t. She is the general who dragged Clarke and Finn to a basement of what must be the last standing structure, and demanded that Clarke save her second in order to save Finn’s life. Arguing won’t do anything for someone like Anya. Instead, Clarke comes close, pleading, appealing to the logic of a general.

“We can’t save them now—”

Anya turns on her with a snarl when can reach out and touch her, but she can’t do anything else before the chute they dropped out of opens again and releases a deluge of bodies into the mining cart. Clarke jumps back in revulsion, and Anya wavers on the spot. A bell clangs and silence endures for a moment, before the _groaning_ starts, and the bodies in the cart start shifting.

“They’re still alive,” Clarke whispers, looking at the cart with horror. A moment later, a new sound reaches her ears: the patter of running footsteps, whoops and shouts and snarls.

Clarke recognizes the noise, but it clicks for Anya first. “They’re _feeding_ my people to the reapers—” She staggers to the wall of the cave and bends to pick up a rock, straining with the effort and threatening collapse. All Clarke wants to do is run, but she can’t leave Anya here, not like this, nor will Anya leave the grounders in the cart.

“You can’t fight them, Anya, you can barely stand! But if we run, we can come back with an army, and save them then. Anya. We have to.”

It’s as if she’s leaving a part of her behind, like an animal chewing its own leg off to escape a trap, but, after a few seconds that feel more like hours, Anya lurches away from the cart. Clarke stays close to her as they break into a run, but the grounder general never looks back.

Reality blurs around the edges of her vision, darkening and flickering like the lanterns that intermittently dot the more-traversed sections of the mining tunnel. The darkness between the lanterns doesn’t seem to bother Anya: she just keeps moving, wordless and intent and Clarke just tries to keep up. At times, all she has to go on is the sound of metered breathing beside her in the pitch black sections of tunnel and it only increases her dissociation with her world. Other times, she swears she sees figures in the shadows, reapers waiting to lunge for her. She hears them constantly—they’re never really there.

The one bastion of reality Clarke clings to in order to keep herself sane and moving is the first thing out of her mouth when they break out of the tunnels and into the blinding sunlight:

“I have to get my people out of there.”

She doubles over, hands on her knees, and says it again to the dirt beneath her bare feet. Anya actually drops to her knees, her blank face hiding whether it is exhaustion or relief that overpowered her. Probably both.

Clarke looks around at the world they emerged into, and in that moment realizes how much she had missed all the smells of earth and the feeling of freezing, misty air on her skin—maybe she outran her feeling of dread, but already, inhaling the world around her, Clarke feels the weight around her shoulders lifting. The tunnel had deposited them onto a wide, stony riverbank downstream from the hydroelectric dam that powers Mount Weather. With fifty yards on either side until the cover of the trees, they’re open and exposed here, the voice in the back of her head tells her, but Clarke can’t help but lean back and relish in the freedom for a moment.

Then the breeze picks up and rustles the hospital gown around her calves, the cold air slicing through the warm exhilaration of escape and reminding her where she is. “I have to get my people out of there,” she repeats again, shutting anything else out.

At some point during their escape, Anya had stopped suddenly in the tunnels. Clarke had protested until she saw Anya gather a pile of boots and clothing, which must have been abandoned by the reapers and the grounders harvested by the Mountain Men—and now that she stands with the cold seeping into her muscles, Clarke appreciates that she grabbed it that much more.

“Anya,” Clarke says as she sifts through the clothing pile Anya dropped nearby and picks out what looks to fit her closest. “Anya, come on, we have to move. We aren’t safe this close to the mountain.”

“Where do you expect to run to that would be safe?” Anya asks drily, finally showing some life.

Clarke throws a shirt and boots at her—even if Anya isn’t shivering (by some strange force of will) Clarke can still see her goosebumps from ten feet away. “Get dressed,” she says more firmly, because that’s the only answer she has right now.

 

* * * * * *

 

They trudge through the forest in silence.

Though Anya had never faltered in her pace in the mining tunnel, she slows their pace significantly as they weave through the trees, leaving Clarke blistering with impatience every time she has to look back and wait for Anya to shuffle to catch up. The burning of her lungs in the tunnels had wiped all rational thought from her mind but now their lack of progress only gives her time to consider the reality of their situation: two straggling escapees, weak and lost, far too close to their target. Clarke marches toward a destination that she doesn’t know the location of, which may as well be empty when she arrives. Her only reason for thinking that Bellamy, Finn, and the others are still alive is the fact that she hasn’t seen their bodies yet. But right now, that’s enough. She knows that the familiar forest around the dropship is somewhere downstream, so she keeps the river within view on her left side and marches on.

It takes several miles for Anya to break the silence at last. “What were the mountain men doing to us?”

Clarke stops short and waits for Anya to draw even with her, trying to formulate an answer from what little she saw in the medical ward and the harvest chamber, something that she can reconcile with the medical knowledge she learned on the Ark.

“They…use your blood,” Clarke says slowly. “I saw a soldier come in with radiation burns, and hours later he was recovering already. It doesn’t make any sense scientifically…but it’s like your blood is healing them somehow. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

If possible, Anya goes even paler. She takes a long look back at the way they came. “I can’t leave them in there.”

“Anya, I know.” Clarke grabs her wrist to regain her attention, and Anya wrenches away as if Clarke’s hand had burned her. “I’m sorry! But my people are in there too—we have to stick together and get them out.”

“There is no _we_ ,” Anya spits.

Clarke draws back, indignant. “I saved your life.”

“You saved me because you needed me to get out of the tunnels. You would never survive without me.”

Instead of shooting back the bitter response that jumps to her tongue, Clarke holds it back: _Tell that to your warriors laying in my camp._ But the thought makes her nauseous in the next moment, and she simply shakes her head. “You can’t fight them without guns, guns that you don’t have. We do. You need us.”

Anya’s eyes narrow. “You keep saying ‘we.’ Your people are in the mountain, same as mine.”

“Not all of them.”

“Did they come down from the sky, as promised?”

_Only the crashed Exodus ship._ And every time she thinks about it, the pain in her gut twists deeper. “Not yet. But they will.” Searching for relief in movement and action, Clarke turns and scrambles over the fallen log ahead of her, cognizant of the time they’re wasting over a pointless conversation. “I mean the ones who escaped the mountain men when the rest of us were taken. They’ll be waiting for me at my ship—”

Before she can finish that sentence, Anya hits her from behind, full-body, with enough force to knock the air out of Clarke’s chest.

She gets half a glimpse of blue sky before Anya is on top of her, driving her into the earth with a surprising weight, and kneeling close to hiss into her ear: “We’re not going to your ship,” she says, binding Clarke’s wrists with a length of fabric. “You killed three hundred of my warriors. I can’t show my face in the commander’s camp without a prize.”

Her knee presses into Clarke’s chest and leaves her gasping for air, unable to suck in a breath to form a response—she can’t even _think_ of one before Anya has her wrists tied tight. It’s over within seconds. Clarke is captive again, and the thought nearly kills her.

“You’re coming with me to the commander,” Anya intones, and hauls Clarke to her feet.

 

* * * * * *

 

As if the return to the forest has reinvigorated Anya; her eyes are alive again, and sparking with dangerous fury. Their slow pace from before is forgotten—now it’s Clarke struggling to keep up, wrenched along by the leash that Anya has fashioned around Clarke’s wrists as they ford off in a new direction, across a shallow part of the freezing river and uphill, through far more difficult terrain. It’s not as if Clarke had known where she was or where she was going in the first place; but with every step comes the distinct idea that she’s getting farther and farther from the dropship and from her friends, and the panic grows with the distance.

She tries everything over the next two hours of forced marching. At moments when Anya has to lever herself up and over boulders and fallen trees, Clarke tries to rip away, but Anya’s grip remains as strong as ever. Clarke tries going limp, collapsing, and Anya simply drags her through the dirt until Clarke clambers to her feet again, bloodied and mud-streaked.

Talking does nothing either. “We’ve been walking for hours,” Clarke complains, “We should rest.” Anya never replies to that. And when Clarke pushes it further with “You need to save your strength,” Anya makes sure to demonstrate just how strong she is with a rough tug on the rope that almost pulls Clarke face-first into the ground.

“My feet are cold, I have to slow down.” Yank. “Do you understand frostbite?”

“What if we get attacked? I would have nothing to defend myself with.” Yank.

“At least take me to the dropship so we can pick up weapons to defend ourselves with.” Yank.

“Why not just kill me and get it over with?” she tries again later, when Anya hisses at her for slowing down. How Anya is still moving, Clarke doesn’t know—the sun has begun to sink below the mountain range ahead of them,

“You can tell the commander what the mountain men are doing to us,” she says coldly.

Clarke digs her feet in and stays put until Anya turns to her with a scowl carved into her features. “Then why don’t we work together?” Clarke pleads. “We don’t have to be enemies!”

“I would never ally myself with someone as weak as you.”

She tugs, hard, but Clarke doesn’t move.

“The commander almost did.”

Clarke doesn’t have an angle for manipulation anymore: Anya is stone-faced and as receptive as the trees around them, and Clarke has long since exhausted any meaningful routes of negotiation. Now she’s talking only to talk, to try to connect, to get through to Anya, not daring to hope that anything will land—but this does. Anya doesn’t soften, but for a fraction of a second, something other than dark anger flashes through her face and she steps closer to Clarke, slackening the leash around her wrist instead of yanking on it.

“The commander was my second,” Anya says, voice low. “I’m a warrior, but she is a leader, and a wise one. She was selected for the position by the commander before her. Don’t begin to think that you can understand the decisions she makes for my people.”

“If she’s a wise leader, you should trust her,” Clarke presses, scrambling for the possible opening Anya had just given her. “You knew on the bridge that she was going to ally with us. I knew it to.”

“And then we went to war.”

“But we don’t have to be at war while someone else is killing our people! Don’t you see that?”

Anya’s face has gone blank; her eyes slip out of focus, the skin around them tightening, and she stares over Clarke’s shoulder as if Clarke isn’t there.

“Anya?”

“ _Quiet!_ Do you hear them? _”_

Nothing but the forest, a silence so complete that it’s almost overwhelming after eighteen years with the machine hum of the Ark. Clarke strains to listen and looks around, staring into miles and miles of trees and greenery all around them. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound.

Anya remains equally as motionless, tense to the point of snapping.

“Anya…” Clarke says slowly, barely audible. She thinks of the tunnels, when she could have sworn she heard the rustling of reapers and mountain men who weren’t there, and she starts to wonder about the possibility of slipping the rope from Anya’s hands now. Yank the rope from between her inattentive fingers, dive for fist-sized rock three feet to their left, get it up in time before Anya can react…

“The mountain men are here,” Anya says. “They tracked us.”

“I don’t—” And then she does. She still can’t hear them—but she sees the flicker of movement between two trees a hundred yards out. Too unnatural to be another two-headed deer. They caught up. They’re going to bring Clarke back.

Anya’s words come on an exhale. “Three miles northwest of here. The commander’s camp. Stay low. Move quickly. Don’t stop. Do not let them take you.”

She unwinds the material around Clarke’s wrists. Clarke’s heartrate kicks up dangerously high, thrumming in her ears.

“When I say—”

The _crack_ of gunfire that rips through silence of the forest sends Clarke stumbling back with the pure shock of it until she lands heavy in the dirt. Three more shots follow in quick succession, echoing off the trees.

Anya drops with a raw-throated yell but it’s the bright red splatter across the tree behind her that makes Clarke’s world flip. _Three miles northwest of here stay low move quickly don’t stop do not let them take you_ —Anya rolls in the dirt and tries to rise but falls, groaning with pain, and Clarke’s instincts have always propelled her toward the helpless and the damaged. Instead of running, she dives forward onto Anya, grabbing at her.

“Come on, Anya, we have to go, you have to stand!” One hand tugs at beneath Anya’s shoulder and tries to pull her up, while the other seeks out the wound in her stomach. She presses on it and the blood seeps out between her fingers—there’s another wound in her shoulder. “Anya, they’re coming!”

Clarke can hear them crashing through the undergrowth, yelling out coordinates to one another—100 yards, 90 yards, 80 yards.

“Anya, we cannot go back there, come on!”

70 yards, 60 yards. Clarke lifts her head to check their approach and the tree above her explodes into splinters, the shot missing her by less than a foot. She drops back to Anya and covers her body, pleading with her even as Anya groans unintelligibly. “Anya, I’m not leaving you here—”

Her please vanish beneath a new wave of shouting that echoes through the trees louder than the gunfire had—it’s all around her, on top of her, and it’s not until a dozen grounders sprint past where she and Anya lay in cover that Clarke recognizes the sounds as the fiery war cries of grounder raiders, bows and spears and swords raised. The gunfire begins in earnest again, melding with the war cries and shouts of terror.

It’s all over as quickly as it had started. The forest is silent again. Her ears fill with the sound of Anya’s ragged breathing, and then, moments later, the crackle of branches underfoot. Clarke keeps her forehead pressed against Anya’s chest and refuses to move.

Someone grabs a fistful of the back of Clarke’s jacket and pulls—she just clings to Anya tighter, keeping her face down and they release her after a moment. The voices of the grounders and the anger in their voices is unmistakable, and even Clarke can recognize the word “sky” in their language. _They know who she is._ All around her, she can hear what must be discussions of what to do with her, punctuated by alternating laughter and arguments, the impatient tap of spears in the dirt.

Then Anya speaks.

“Don’t kill her.”

As weak as her voice is, there’s a force behind her words that brings a silence down on the grounders above her. “Don’t kill her,” she says again. “She’s for the commander.”

It takes them forever to pull Clarke off of Anya, even after they’ve put their weapons away and Anya has fallen unconscious.

For several terrifying minutes, Clarke thinks they’re going to kill her anyway, despite Anya’s orders. The grounders manage to wrap the bleeding from the wound in her shoulder but she doesn’t regain awareness despite Clarke’s silent pleas—Anya would never know if they followed her command for mercy or not, and she’s in no position to stop them if they don’t feel like complying.

Instead, she ends up with a hood over her head, the leash on her wrists tied to the saddle of a horse. The hood reassures her, despite the situation. If she doesn’t see where they’re going, they might not kill her.

After a few miles of walking, the sounds of the forest disappear beneath the clatter of something more lively:  the crackle of bonfires, the calls and greetings of warriors, footsteps, conversations, the far off whinnying of horses hitched for the night. It’s dinnertime—that must be the source of the conversation and the clinking of metal on metal—and god, the food smells like nothing Clarke has ever experienced before. Her mouth waters, but they don’t steer her toward the source. When the horse she is tied to finally stops, the grounders untie Clarke and shove her into the warm interior of a tent.

Right away, she can tell that things are different here: the warm camp sounds from outside are drowned out by grounders yelling orders at each other, everyone talking over one another, metal instruments clanging on a wooden table. When they pull the rough cloth hood from her face, the sight confirms that they must have brought her to the medical tent. Anya lies stripped to the waist on a cot in the center of a small room, visible only in glimpses between the bodies of the grounders who stand around the tent, barking at each other, covered in her bright red blood. Clarke steps forward to help them, but a guard prods her with the butt-end of his spear towards a cot in the far corner of the tent, out of the way; he bares his teeth when she tries to move toward Anya again. Clarke knows she has no way of escaping the camp unseen anyway, not when they were carried in with such a commotion of thundering horses and shouting warriors. So she stays in her cot and watches the grounders bustle around Anya’s lifeless form and try to staunch the bleeding from her stomach.

As panicked as the grounders in the tent may be, not one person, including Clarke and the motionless guards at the entrance of the tent, flinches away when someone grabs a dagger and holds it over an open flame to heat. They all know what’s coming. In fact, it seems to settle the tent somewhat. The bloodied grounders step back and wait until the dagger is glowing orange-red. Clarke clenches her jaw and stares at the wound in Anya’s side.

She doesn’t even move when they press the hot knife to the wound. It sizzles and burns against her flesh and the grounders grimace and look away, but Anya may as well be dead.

When they pull the knife away, at least the bleeding has stopped. It takes Clarke a second to work up to the words. “Is she still breathing?”

One of the women who had been holding gauze to the wound stares intently at Anya for a moment, then she nods.

“She hasn’t lost enough blood for it to be life-threatening,” Clarke says, sounding small and tired. “But she could still be bleeding internally, so you’ll have to watch her. But she might be okay as long as she’s still breathing now.”

In that moment, all other conversation vanishes when the tent flap opens and the commander bursts through it.

_The commander._ Every inch the title. She strides into the tent and stands in the center for half a second, eyes wild and terrible, hair wind-swept, face flushed with exertion and breath coming in short pants. Her green eyes, set in the black of her warpaint again, fix on Anya unblinking, the question of reality evident in the twitch of her jaw and the shallow rise and fall of her chest. She strips away riding gloves and tosses them to the corner of the tent and approaches slowly, all ferocity bleeding out of her as she reaches for Anya with bare hands.

“Anya.” Her voice belies her appearance: soft, tender, shaking with disbelief. She hovers over the woman on the cot, who doesn’t stir, even when Lexa becomes more desperate and searching hands drift over the cauterized wounds and her bare stomach, looking for life. “ _Anya.”_

Clarke feels a twinge of sympathy that pulls her out of her mesmerized reverie that Lexa’s appearance had created.

_“_ She’s still alive,” she reassures the commander. Her voice sounds strange in the sudden silence of the tent. Like she’s intruding somewhere she shouldn’t be. Something personal and intimate. It lowers the more she talks, trailing off. “She’s still breathing. They stopped the bleeding…”

Lexa’s gaze lift to Clarke from where she stands bent over Anya’s body. She stares for a long moment, as if not fully seeing Clarke, or understanding why she’s there. But the rise and fall of Anya’s chest gets her attention next, proving Clarke’s honesty and Anya’s continued survival; Lexa straightens up to her full height and adds to it by raising her chin, eyes dark as the warpaint around them, the mask of the noble leader of earth returning as quickly as she had dropped it. Lexa ages an eternity in those few seconds. The goddess of the forest once more.

Something about that galvanizes Clarke, imbuing her with an electric mixture of fear and anger and a strange rawness that crackles all the way to her fingertips. She is alive on earth too, now. She’s survived. She will not face this commander lying down. With a ragged breath, Clarke pushes herself up out of the cot and to her feet so that she can meet Lexa’s eyes.

The moment she does, she can feel the shift in the room. She’s no longer captive, no longer injured, or exhausted, or beaten down. Lexa holds her gaze with the upmost respect, waiting until Clarke draws even before she speaks with a drawling, dark tone.

“You’re the one who burned 300 of my warriors alive.”

“You’re the one who sent them there to kill us,” Clarke replies simply.

_Blood for blood,_ she remembers, from the night Lexa held her captive. Her voice is as dry as it was that night. Just numbers. Chess pieces. And those numbers are not something she wants weighing on her conscience.

The grounder guards had dropped their hands to their weapons when Clarke rose; now they whisper threats. Clarke ignores them, her eyes on Lexa, the only true threat in this room. Her heart beats wildly with fear and adrenaline and a hot sort of fury as she stands opposite this girl, a leader who can’t be much older than her—until Lexa puts her hand up to silence the guards behind her and Clarke breathes an imperceptible sigh of relief.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you, Clarke. We’re at war.”

The threatening glint in her eyes, like a cat playing with its meal, turns Clarke indignant. “I brought Anya to you.”

Lexa raises an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t have made it here without Anya. She brought you here. And now she’s been shot. Why should I spare you for bringing me her body?”

“Anya was a prisoner at Mount Weather, next up to be executed,” Clarke presses. “I rescued her and we escaped. And she’s still breathing.”

The whole tent freezes at Clarke’s first words; she doesn’t even think they heard the last ones. Curiosity and uncertainty flicker across Lexa’s face as she scrutinizes Clarke, as if she had used words grounders had never heard before but understood the meaning of. Her eyes narrow; Clarke raises her chin against Lexa’s distrust.

“That’s a lie,” rumbles one of the grounder guards. “Heda, no one makes it out of the mountain alive. This is a trick. Kill her.”

“Quiet, Gustus.”

“Look at her,” Clarke pleads. “She’s been imprisoned, starved. My friends and I couldn’t have done that to one of your best warriors without you knowing. We were imprisoned in Mount Weather.”

Lexa fingers the hilt of the knife at her belt. The handle is well-worn from similar ruminations, and that sight fills her with a fleeting hope that Lexa may not want to bury it in her chest. “Tell me, if you escaped the mountain, why come here? Why not imprison Anya, barter her life for yours?”

“Because I’m not like you.” This earns her a flicker of bared teeth, a darkened gaze, but Lexa’s fingers don’t move from her knife—Clarke continues on the thin ice with that small reassurance. “And because my people are still in there. And so are yours. Hundreds of them, prisoners. We can work together to get them out.”

“Let me kill her for you, Heda,” Gustus declares. Her heart drops.

“Not yet, Gustus.” Lexa drags out the sounds, taking her time. The amused, predatory glint in her eye returns when she nods to Clarke. “You haven’t answered my question of why I shouldn’t kill you. If your people are in the mountain, you have nothing to offer me, Clarke of the Sky People, except an opportunity for justice for the warriors you burned. Every warrior in this camp lost someone that day. Why should I deny them that?”

She has nothing left to offer but math. “I burned 300, but there are hundreds more inside Mount Weather. I was there, I met their leaders, I know their people. You can’t take it down and save your people without me.”

“I—”

“She’s right,” comes a weak voice. _Anya._ Her eyes are open. It jolts Clarke but Lexa, Lexa shudders out of the statuesque repose her position demands of her and whips around instantly, breathing out either a term of endearment or a disbelieving swear word. Clarke doesn’t think there’s much difference in the grounder language.

Anya tries to lift her head, but falls back to the pillows with a grunt of pain as Lexa jumps to her bedside.

“Lie still,” Lexa urges, and it still comes out like an order even on her shaky breath. She straightens up for a moment, and, more firmly, gives a real command to the rest of the tent: “Leave us.”

Clarke looks to the two guards, who both clearly want to step forward to Anya the way Lexa had: they glance at one another, then to Clarke and she understands that they will not leave her alone with Lexa, not while Clarke can stand. She knows Lexa’s order includes her as well.

She limps toward the entrance, but then Anya’s voice sounds again: “Not Clarke. Let her speak.”

“Anya—” Lexa says.

“If you’re going to turn away a healer when I’m laying here wounded, you’re not as bright as you were before I went off to kill the sky people. You’ve obviously missed my influence.”

Lexa snorts derisively. “Fine. Clarke. Stay. Everyone else, _gon we._ ”

When they’re gone, the commander softens again, bending close to Anya and searching her face in such a strange show of humanity that Clarke feels once more as if she’s intruding, as if she should have been carried out a prisoner if she won’t be used as a doctor—she’s never been a spectator before. She shifts uncomfortably in the silence, forgotten behind Lexa.

Lexa’s voice falls heavy as she looks down at Anya. “When they told me…I thought I’d sent you to burn.”

“And give Tristan command of your armies?” Anya releases a low laugh that cuts off in a wince of pain. “My Heda underestimates me. I’m disappointed. You must have forgotten all of the bruises I left on you when you were a child.”

_The commander was my second._ Anya’s words are so easily affectionate, especially in her weakened state, that Clarke feels herself soften.

Lexa shakes her head. “When I was a child,” she echoes pointedly, before growing serious. “Where did they take you?”

“The mountain. They took all the survivors of the battle. The sky people as well.”

Anya’s eyes flick to Clarke, which seems to serve as a reminder to Lexa that the other girl is even still in the room. The glow in her eyes when she looks over her shoulder at Clarke is unreadable again: wrath and fascination and scrutiny and something else that takes the breath out of Clarke’s chest. But Lexa retains her power even with her position over Anya and doesn’t beckon Clarke forward, so she remains in the center of the room for Lexa’s judgement, shifting and hot and morbidly fascinated with her gaze as well, until Anya’s voice breaks the silence again.

“They caged us. Not the sky people—our people. Cages. Then they killed us. Day by day. Slowly. Then—” she pauses, glancing to Clarke again. “The leader of the sky people appeared and pulled me out. We escaped through the tunnels, and made it here.”

Lexa remains still for a long moment. “What are they doing in the mountain, Clarke of the Sky People?”

“Using your people for their blood,” Clarke says, voice hoarse. “They keep them in cages until they need them, drain their blood for medicine, and feed them to the reapers.”

“What are they doing with yours?”

Clarke swallows. “Mine are prisoners too. I don’t know what for yet.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Anya says. “We need to free our people, Lexa. They’re dying.”

The finality of that hangs heavy in the air over all three women. Nothing more to debate about it. Lexa’s jaw works as she paces away from Anya’s bedside, deep in thought, and the reprieve from the commander allows Anya to close her eyes and relax her head on the pillow. Clarke just prays, realizing her fate is tied to the military decision.

“Indra will arrive with the reinforcements from TonDC tomorrow,” Lexa says at last. “I’ll inform the generals we’re going to war. Again. And Clarke…” she adds, turning to her suddenly. “What will you do to save your people in the mountain?”

The wound on her forearm form when she had opened it to get into the medical ward twinges, a painful reminder, but it’s the camp of torched grounders she thinks of instead.

“Anything.”

Lexa searches Clarke’s face and nods solemnly. “Then our truce begins now. Gustus!” Her guard reappears instantly. “Clarke is not to be harmed,” she tells him, with a nod at her. “Take her to a decent place to sleep and ensure her protection.” Her steady gaze fixes Clarke again, sparking energy in Clarke’s stomach. “Rest tonight. Preparations start in the morning.”

The night wears long when they finally escort Clarke from the tent. The bonfires she smelled when they led her in have burned down to piles of glowing orange embers, and the absence of the resting warriors in the camp leaves it pitch-black and desolate. Remembering the smell of food so vividly she can taste it on her tongue, Clarke stares wistfully at the fire pits, before she gets a shove in the back and one clunky English word:

“Walk.”

She expects a cage—what she gets is a tent. Small, cramped, hastily constructed, with barely enough room for a small bed of a few thin furs, but a tent. She stops short at the entrance and looks at the guard in confusion and mistrust, but he shrugs, reading her misgivings.

“You cannot leave the camp; Heda has ordered us to kill in the event of an escape attempt. But you will not be kept like an animal.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.” She can do docile. She’s not a flight risk. Dante Wallace had believed the same when he offered her a safe place to sleep and told her not to run.

The guard waits outside her tent until she blows out the single candle sitting on a barrel. She tries to stay alert to the sound of his footsteps crunching away, but the moment she sits on the bundle of furs that functions as her bed, it’s over. The darkness takes her aching limbs and cloudy mind before she even realizes it.

 

* * * * * 

 

The loud bark of an order pulls Clarke from her dreamless sleep. She jolts with the noise and scrambles for a weapon, anything she can use, but her fingers close only around the furs and by then, it’s too late anyway: the tent flap has opened, allowing a blinding stream of early-morning sunlight in, and a grounder has already stepped through with a plate in her hands. Despite Clarke’s shock and bared teeth, like a small, trapped animal, the grounder offers the plate anyway.

“Eat,” she says, unaffected. “And dress. The commander has requested you following the meeting of her generals.”

_Eat._ Clarke practically inhales the plate of sweet fruits she doesn’t know the name of, ignoring the sidelong look of disapproval from the grounder. After that, nose scrunched up, the woman waits outside, but Clarke doesn’t take long to dress and join her.

Now that she can see it in the daylight, the camp is smaller than it sounded last night, just a few dozen tents tucked away among the boulders at the bottom of a rocky bluff. It’s largely empty, too, but Clarke only receives silence when she asks her escort where everyone is. It’s a short walk before they arrive at the commander’s tent—and it’s clearly the commander’s, larger than the others and draped in red and flanked by four stoic guards—and Gustus announces their arrival.

After a moment, Lexa calls Clarke in with a monotone “ _Enter.”_

She stands with her back to the entrance, leaning forward onto her palms to hunch over the long table in the center of the tent. One half is covered with maps and letters and slips of paper, but the other is painted green and brown and blue and dotted with figurines. A throne sits farther back, raised above the rest of the tent —Clarke stares at it, perfectly envisioning the power that Lexa exudes when she’s seated there—and a partition to the side separates a small living area. Clarke takes all of this in as she stands at the entrance, waiting for Lexa’s acknowledgement.

“Join me,” she says, without turning.

That’s vague enough to allow Clarke to give the grounder leader a wide birth as she circles to the other side of the table. Closer now, she can the details of the painted map and the different models that decorate it. Lexa seems unaffected by Clarke’s entrance, never looking up from the models.

“How’s Anya?” Clarke asks, for lack of anything better.

“She made it through the night.”

“Then she’s probably okay—no serious internal damage.”

Lexa doesn’t reply for a long moment leaving Clarke searching for something else to say, before Lexa finally speaks again: “I spoke to the riders who found you and Anya. They told me you covered her body after she was wounded, even after they had killed the mountain men, and you wouldn’t let go. You did save her.” She swallows hard, looking down and away, and has to pull the words from her throat. “ _Thank you.”_

Clarke blinks in surprise. _Gratitude?_ It throws her off balance, and she clings to what she knows: “I told you, I’ll do whatever it takes to save my friends. I just want to get them out.”

“We want the same things, Clarke,” Lexa says, rolling the hard sound of her name off of the roof of her mouth and sending a shock down Clarke’s spine. Bitterness replaces the softness a moment later, though: “But you _incinerated_ a vast section of my army. The warriors remaining will be required to defend my people from attack from the rest of the clans—Trikru can’t fight a two-front war.”

“Then who do we have?” Clarke demands.

“ _We_?” Lexa asks, one eyebrow twitching upwards to question the insolence of that assumption. Clarke grits her teeth.

“You, and me, and your generals,” she specifies, fighting to keep her voice even. “My people, your people. Who do _we_ have to save them?”

Lexa sighs, looking back down at the table and chewing the inside of her cheek in thought. Clarke stares at the pieces as well, but they don’t hold the meaning to her that they do to Lexa; instead, her gaze drifts up to the commander’s face, and she watches the machinations and plans dance behind Lexa’s eyes as she darts from piece to piece, shaking her head each time a mental plan fails.

“The Lake people…” she begins, then pauses. “The Lake People and the Broadleaf Clan used to be Trikru allies, but their military is weak. But, if we can convince them to fight with us, the Rock Line clan and the Plains Riders will join, despite their small population.”

“You just said you’re at war with them, they’ll attack when they know you’re weakened,” Clarke says, frowning.

“I was at war with you this time yesterday, and now you stand opposite me planning our next attack.” The ghost of a sardonic smile plays at Lexa’s lips for a moment as she looks to Clarke. “We have a common enemy, Clarke, not a desire for friendship. If we can create a truce between the clans, we will have a chance to take down an enemy that has terrorized us all.”

“And will they believe that?”

The hint of the smile only grows stronger, with a new, bloody intensity. “We will see. We ride out for the Lake People tomorrow,” Lexa declares. “And you will ride with us.”


End file.
